The Approach of a Critical Science
From the last article it has emerged that all the prerequisites for objectivity are present in thinking, i.e. the possibility of grasping the connections and laws in the world with the help of thinking.
This makes it possible to liberate science from its naive state or to elevate it to a critical one.
By becoming aware of the necessary steps, one receives the confirmation to arrive at findings that go beyond one’s own subjective organisation or limitations.
The principles of any scientific approach, i.e. if findings are to be asserted, are therefore always the following first three steps:
1) Experience / Observation
2) The urge for knowledge / What is it?
3) The search for concepts / Thesis in thinking (thinking intuition¹)
In the first step, some phenomenon appears before the senses, of which one does not know or does not know exactly what it is.
In other words, the outer form of an appearance is confronted through experience.²
It is the resulting mystery that leaves one unsatisfied and raises the question of the missing part, i.e. the question of the actual core of what one is experiencing.
This already challenges the first activity of one’s own thinking.
Accordingly, the second step is to ask the question “What is it?”, i.e. the (intrinsic) urge to know.
Only in the third step is an attempt made, through one’s own active thinking, to bring to light what is hidden in the experience.
That is, the actual content and context (laws) of the experienced phenomenon.
In this way, the experienced phenomenon ceases to be merely a foreign element outside of oneself.
In the sense that the immersion in the associated concepts of the experienced phenomenon, i.e. in the part that was previously missing in the experience, comes to light within oneself.
There is then no longer any separation between the experiences and oneself.
This is because the experienced phenomena then speak the thoughts within oneself, so to speak.
In one’s inner world, the inner nature is revealed and the things of the outer world are no longer alien.
At this moment, the contrast between objective external experience and subjective inner world of thought disappears.
In concrete terms, one begins to think about an experienced phenomenon or to ask questions, and if it goes well, i.e. the necessary concepts arise from the thinking intuition, the matter becomes clearer.
Because as soon as you start thinking about something and the first concepts emerge, coherence appears everywhere and thoughts begin to flow into one another.
One concept leads to another, a third explains or supports a fourth, and so on.
As shown in the example of the concept of causality, this cannot be thought without the concepts of ‘cause’ and ‘effect’.³
Or, to take another example, the concept of ‘organism’ cannot be conceived without the concepts of ‘growth’, ‘lawful development’, etc. appearing at the same time.
The individual thoughts or concepts that appear therefore always appear as parts of a larger whole, i.e. one’s own world of concepts or ideas.
This means that all concepts formed in individual things coincide into one.
For example, all the concepts that are formed from an elephant are combined into the overall concept ‘elephant’.
A concept must therefore be present in order to be able to make the experienced comprehensible, because it is not in the experience to grasp its connections or laws.
This can only be done in thinking in order to recognise the experienced as a manifestation of that law.
Thinking itself says nothing about whether a conceptually grasped law and a phenomenon actually correspond in terms of content.
Thinking merely provides the opportunity to determine, through mutual reference, whether law and phenomenon prove to correspond.⁴
Its role is purely formal, in that it merely establishes the reference and then waits to see what results from it.
If nothing results from the established reference, i.e. its dependencies do not become apparent in thinking, then the attempt to think fails.
A realisation therefore only comes about when a connection is established which turns out to be correct, when phenomenon and law coincide.
This distinguishes two essential things: on the one hand, the phenomena that one encounters through experience, and on the other, one’s own thinking, which forms concepts in order to penetrate the laws of a phenomenon.
This division into two parts is due to one’s own subjective organisation.
Only the synthesis, i.e. the unification of both in the act of knowledge, constitutes the full reality or deserves to be described as such.
All knowledge are therefore fusion products of elements that have their origin in experience on the one hand and thinking on the other.
In everyday consciousness, however, this distinction is usually difficult to grasp, since the two merge directly in the often unconscious act of knowing.
In summary, what generally characterises the scientific approach can be described as the penetration of reality by thought.
It consists of the fusion of experience (phenomenon) and thinking (conceptualisation), which results in knowledge (thesis).
However, this process alone still lacks an essential element in order to actually be able to speak of science.
What is meant is certainty, i.e. proof, because without this, the procedure described remains in the realm of philosophy, as there is no verification of reality with the previously developed world view (world of concepts or ideas).
The question therefore arises as to how one can check whether a realisation is actually true. More on this in my next post.
[1] Read “Criticism of Objectivity in Thinking” for a detailed explanation of ‘intuition’: https://medium.com/@HeimatloserM/criticism-of-objectivity-in-thinking-3adb2b0b9615
[2] If one lacks or neglects the exact experience or description of what is observed in relation to a phenomenon, one inevitably falls into the creation of purely abstract theses and theories about this matter. This in turn inevitably leads to pure speculation and assertions. Just as can be observed today from the scientific side with its auxiliary hypotheses and models of all kinds and to the same extent from spiritual gurus with their often very vague and imprecise descriptions. Therefore, only the observation combined with thinking can be the starting point for all scientifically justified endeavours.
[3] Read “The Act of Knowing” for the example: https://medium.com/@HeimatloserM/the-act-of-knowing-f23939c7de4b
[4] [4] Read “Objectivity In Thinking” for a detailed explanation: https://medium.com/@HeimatloserM/objectivity-in-thinking-a413a422b06b
Note: This text was originally written in German and translated into English using Deepl, because I’m a native German speaker.
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