2.4 Back to the Things Themselves
The decisive question now is: how does one arrive at such insights? The answer is: by looking carefully.
That sounds banal. But it is the opposite of banal. For “looking carefully” here does not mean viewing something with one’s eyes. It means directing one’s mind to the matter — calmly, attentively, without prejudices.
In philosophy there is a famous principle for this: “Back to the things themselves!” This principle, which goes back to Edmund Husserl (1859—1938), means: do not let yourself be guided by theories, systems, or prevailing opinions. Approach the thing itself. Look at what is really there. And describe it as it shows itself — not as it would have to be according to some theory.
Peter Wust (1884—1940) described this principle this way: it is a matter of the “cognizing mind taking its measure from the measure-giving things”. It is not thinking that dictates to things what they are to be. Rather, the things themselves give thinking its measure.1
That is a fundamentally different approach from the one we know from many modern debates. In those debates, the view is often: “We construct our reality.” Or: “There is no objective truth, only different perspectives.” The philosophical method advocated here says the opposite: reality is there first. It exists independently of our thinking. And our task is to know it as it is — not to reinterpret it according to our wishes.
Hedwig Conrad-Martius (1888—1966), an important representative of this method, once described the core of this attitude as follows: what is required is “an unsurpassable radicality of purely intellectual readiness for the things and devotion to the things”. It involves “a complete switching off of all pre-judgments, of all premature judging” and “the unconditional capacity for a pure and untroubled gaze upon the matter”.2
This is not a recipe for indifference. It is the opposite: the highest intellectual attentiveness and the readiness to let oneself be taught by reality.
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Fußnoten
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Peter Wust writes this about phenomenology, as H. Conrad-Martius reports. Cf. Conrad-Martius, Phänomenologie und Spekulation (1960), p. 69. German original: „Maßnehmen des erkennenden Geistes an den maßgebenden Dingen”. ↩
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Conrad-Martius, „Phänomenologie und Spekulation” (“Phenomenology and Speculation”, 1965), in: Schriften zur Philosophie, vol. 3, Munich: Kösel, 1965, p. 68. German originals: „eine Radikalität rein geistiger Sachbereitschaft und Sachhingabe, wie sie nicht mehr überboten werden kann”; „ein völliges Ausschalten aller Vor-Urteile, alles vorschnellen Urteilens”; „das bedingungslose Vermögen eines reinen und ungetrübten Blickes auf die Sache”. ↩