The basics again
Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2023 5:02 pm
Hello everyone,
I wanted to post a little Essay wich I have written 2 days ago.
It is nothing new to many people in this forum, but I want to share it to get a clearer idea myself.
Maybe it will help somebody unfamiliar with this topic, to understand the direction of this things.
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When we look at human actions as expressed in art, science and religion, we should ask ourselves why people carry them out.
What is an essential attribute of man that gave rise to the tremendous scientific and philosophical history of man?
It is his desire for knowledge, for understanding the world, and his place and role in it.
Here I have only said what is already clear to everyone, and yet few people think about it.
Countless thinkers gave us different theories and explanatory models; there were many different attempts and approaches that were intended to make the world more understandable.
My goal with this text is not to think of further modeling of the world, but rather to deal with the question of what makes these attempts at explanation and how one actually recognizes anything.
Let's start with what needs to be explained, that is the world.
What is the world? What is it we want to explain?
A place made of matter, separate from us, which we perceive?
A dream dreamed by God?
To be free from speculation and premises, we must put aside all our supposed knowledge, our intuition about what the world is and how it works, and stick to the facts of our experience.
So what is the world we want to explain?
It is the totality of our perception, this means all conscious phenomena.
Colors, shapes, sounds, smells, sensations (e.g. feeling heat and cold), emotions, tastes, smells make up the world we know.
To say that this is not the world as it actually is is again a judgment about the world, i.e. an attempt at explanation, a theory, but my aim with this writing is
to go one step deeper.
We have classified the world as the entirety of our conscious content.
Does the world appear to us as something finished? Do we know the world through our perception?
To answer this question a simple example can be given.
Imagine that you are going for a walk at night.
During the walk, you notice pulsating lights in the sky that are unfamiliar to you.
Now imagine how you react to this perception.
What do you do?
One looks for a suitable explanation, a suitable term for the perception, because otherwise it is like a disharmonious tone in the otherwise harmonious symphony of our knowledge.
We have the drive to understand our perceptions, because they do not come as a finished perception, as in our everyday intuition, but only become the world we are used to through our own thought activity.
In order to be able to speak of something at all, our perceptions must be explained by our thinking.
Perception and thinking are the foundation of our journey of knowledge.
In order for any statement about the world to be true, for example that it consists of matter and is separate from us, thoughts about perception must have formed.
Every statement about the world requires thinking. Thinking is our activity, while perception is something given.
But what would perception be without thinking?
A picture full of shapes, colors and other impressions, but with no recognizable “things”.
This would include the fact that these recognizable things are only structured through thinking and come into being with concepts or ideas.
Here we come to an important point in our little investigation.
We can recognize that we are not mere observers of a finished world and create mere representations of it in our minds, but rather our own activity and mere perception bring the world into being.
If it is now objected that our activity is just a brain function, then we are rejecting our own inner experience for a theoretical explanation that emerges through our inner activity.
According to this perspective, our current material world view is nothing more than a story in which we are blind to see the narrator.
What is this activity that makes the world understandable?
Should we take a deeper look at our own activity, which is the reason we can speak about anything, to study the depth of our being, or should we replace our activity with its produced "products"?
Can we replace the poet with his poems?
I wanted to post a little Essay wich I have written 2 days ago.
It is nothing new to many people in this forum, but I want to share it to get a clearer idea myself.
Maybe it will help somebody unfamiliar with this topic, to understand the direction of this things.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When we look at human actions as expressed in art, science and religion, we should ask ourselves why people carry them out.
What is an essential attribute of man that gave rise to the tremendous scientific and philosophical history of man?
It is his desire for knowledge, for understanding the world, and his place and role in it.
Here I have only said what is already clear to everyone, and yet few people think about it.
Countless thinkers gave us different theories and explanatory models; there were many different attempts and approaches that were intended to make the world more understandable.
My goal with this text is not to think of further modeling of the world, but rather to deal with the question of what makes these attempts at explanation and how one actually recognizes anything.
Let's start with what needs to be explained, that is the world.
What is the world? What is it we want to explain?
A place made of matter, separate from us, which we perceive?
A dream dreamed by God?
To be free from speculation and premises, we must put aside all our supposed knowledge, our intuition about what the world is and how it works, and stick to the facts of our experience.
So what is the world we want to explain?
It is the totality of our perception, this means all conscious phenomena.
Colors, shapes, sounds, smells, sensations (e.g. feeling heat and cold), emotions, tastes, smells make up the world we know.
To say that this is not the world as it actually is is again a judgment about the world, i.e. an attempt at explanation, a theory, but my aim with this writing is
to go one step deeper.
We have classified the world as the entirety of our conscious content.
Does the world appear to us as something finished? Do we know the world through our perception?
To answer this question a simple example can be given.
Imagine that you are going for a walk at night.
During the walk, you notice pulsating lights in the sky that are unfamiliar to you.
Now imagine how you react to this perception.
What do you do?
One looks for a suitable explanation, a suitable term for the perception, because otherwise it is like a disharmonious tone in the otherwise harmonious symphony of our knowledge.
We have the drive to understand our perceptions, because they do not come as a finished perception, as in our everyday intuition, but only become the world we are used to through our own thought activity.
In order to be able to speak of something at all, our perceptions must be explained by our thinking.
Perception and thinking are the foundation of our journey of knowledge.
In order for any statement about the world to be true, for example that it consists of matter and is separate from us, thoughts about perception must have formed.
Every statement about the world requires thinking. Thinking is our activity, while perception is something given.
But what would perception be without thinking?
A picture full of shapes, colors and other impressions, but with no recognizable “things”.
This would include the fact that these recognizable things are only structured through thinking and come into being with concepts or ideas.
Here we come to an important point in our little investigation.
We can recognize that we are not mere observers of a finished world and create mere representations of it in our minds, but rather our own activity and mere perception bring the world into being.
If it is now objected that our activity is just a brain function, then we are rejecting our own inner experience for a theoretical explanation that emerges through our inner activity.
According to this perspective, our current material world view is nothing more than a story in which we are blind to see the narrator.
What is this activity that makes the world understandable?
Should we take a deeper look at our own activity, which is the reason we can speak about anything, to study the depth of our being, or should we replace our activity with its produced "products"?
Can we replace the poet with his poems?