Mitteilungen 49/2009 - Fachverband Philosophie e.v.

velopments of the stars, thus using only one way of seeing which we characterized
as “staring”.
Of course, scientific theories can and have indeed expanded our view of life, but
scientific knowledge cannot serve our demand of directly giving our existence a new
meaning: it can be used as an instrument for technological developments, which
then change or manipulate our use of objects, even our experiences, but it cannot
simply delete thousands of years of human history, religion or philosophy.
To choose the word “seeing” as a fundamental way of existing means to emphasize
the pre-reflective experience of the consciousness in opposite to a rationalistic point
of view, in which the human mind can transcend every condition of his existence
with the final aim to reach infinity as an escape from the misery of natural life.
By acknowledging the astonishing presence of a reality our thoughts cannot transcend
anymore, a reality which we cannot put in words, we save our subjectivity
from the penetrating assault from sciences, which already proclaimed the death of
the subject (also see Foucault) with the utopian intention to fully explain human behaviour,
perception and thoughts by examining the brain.
In a fully explainable existence of the human being, there is simply no place anymore
for the unexplainable, the presence of the other, hope, identity and – finally –
our consciousness. You cannot understand yourself as a meaningful being if you
understand yourself only as an object, living in this world coincidentally.
By the intent to surmount the gulf of objectivity and subjectivity, of sciences and religion
or philosophy, of staring and seeing, there is already the presupposition that
sciences and humanities or religion are on the same level of truth, that both of them
may be two sides of the same coin. However, before knowledge there is astonishment,
before anobservation there is natural experience of the consciousness,
before staring there is seeing.
Thus: before I can try to describe the stars in detail, before I try to formulate abstract
laws on the basis of my observations and conclude a possible reality that I
think, I stand lonely before a overwhelming cosmos: a reality that I exist in.
The question if the gulf between objectivity and subjectivity can be bridged by a
Both – And must be rejected because in fact our systems of objectivity rely deeply
on the experiences (meaning: Erleben) of the subjects themselves. This does not
end in relativism, meaning that every subject would have his own truth, but it shows
that our perception of reality basically relies on the structures of our consciousness
and our relation to an outer reality.
It would then be the same mistake to put God between the laws of physics as to put
the laws of physics between God, because mixing these two categories means
misunderstanding the Either – Or of either describing and explaining a phenomenon
because of its functions and possible use or understanding it within the limits of my
existence, thus understanding a phenomenon as an expression of the possibilities
of my own existence, e.g. in a religious sense the infinite, star-filled sky as a possibility
or a metaphor for my own immortality.
The consciousness of the absence of something or of alienation while we are confronted
with a scientific “reality” that has become independent of the existence of
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