ABSTRACT

The preconditions of scientific logos’ approach, its possibilities and its limitations have seldom been as thoroughly analysed as in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the first edition of which was published in 1781.1 The word ‘critique’ is derived from the Greek verb ‘krinein’, which means to distinguish, but also to judge in the sense of the giving of a verdict in a legal action. Critique in the sense of Kant is not carping or nagging, but the clarification of unsettled claims to truth and the distinguishing between prejudices and opinions on the one hand, and insights and truths on the other. Critique furthermore refers to a mindset that reveals the highest potentials of the scientific logos: the willingness to question in an unbiased manner all that is proclaimed by others to be true, but also all which oneself would generally consider to be true; to examine all this, and to subject what has passed such examination to the examination of other reasonable individuals. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason examines the accomplishments of human insight, the highest facility of which is called reason. The Critique of Pure Reason is, among other things, intended to lay a sure foundation for the solution to the following question: where can reason, proceeding scientifically, lay claim to perception and insight and where does this claim end? Sure knowledge and certain perception are to be distinguished from ‘non-knowledge’ and dubious knowledge: when can we lay claim to the certainty of the scientific logos and where are its limitations? In answering this question, Kant’s distinction between ‘the things-in-themselves’ and their ‘appearance’ in time and space is crucial. Our scientific knowledge extends, according to Kant, exclusively to the appearances; the basis of the appearance, however, the thing-in-itself, is hidden from us. In regard to the thing-in-itself we are ignorant.2 What is meant by this? The empirical basis of all natural and social sciences is data derived from the sphere of experience – data, which are won through all manner of measurement and survey methods. One of the preconditions of this is so seemingly banal that we hardly take note of it: we must be able to perceive the data with our senses within time and space, for what is outside of time and space can never become data. Our sensory perception can apparently be infinitely refined: by the

application of instruments of measurement, with the use of microscopes, telescopes and devices registering wavelengths of all kinds, etc. Yet our sensory perception is nonetheless restricted: as we can only register things and processes through perception within time and space, we register only that part of them we perceive directly (or which we can read from the data provided by our instruments). If the things we perceive with our senses or our instruments have principally imperceptible qualities, these remain necessarily concealed from us. This may sound a little artificial: why should we take note of qualities that can never possibly enter our field of vision? However, something that can very well be of great concern and relevance to us remains concealed: the innermost part of the things, their original essence. We can dismantle an object or a living creature as much as we like, their essence will not reveal itself to us; we see only certain perspectives. The essence of an object in time and space – whatever that may be – is itself not an object in time and space. Many natural scientists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries assumed that everything that exists, exists in time and space (even if possibly not accessible to our instruments of perception). In such a worldview there is no room for anything that could be defined as the original essence of things – no room, for no one can show what the original essence of things might be. The (in modern science still widespread) assumption that it is out of place, senseless or useless to speak of the original essence of things cannot, however, be either proven or refuted: it cannot be the object of the scientific method. If, for example, as many cultures assumed, a soul were present in all things, an inner self, which was not subjected to the laws of time and space as we generally experience them, then this would be something imperceptible to all five of our everyday senses. Great philosophers and theologians of Judaism, Christianity or Islam have referred to God as an essentially non-sensory reality outside of time and space; for them, God was eternal and eternity, an inaccessible enigma to our time-bound sight and understanding. We encounter something similar in our experience of love. Anyone who is in love believes that an enigma resides deep within the one they love. Perhaps one can even say that within everything we encounter with affection, such an inaccessible stratum of enigma is present.3