2.3 Setting Prejudices Aside
An important precondition of genuine philosophical knowledge is the readiness to set prejudices aside.
This does not mean the opinions that we all hold and that make life easier for us. What is meant, rather, are unexamined assumptions that have lodged themselves so deeply in our thinking that we no longer recognize them as assumptions. These include, above all, three kinds of intellectual obstacles:
2.3.1 a) Blanket Arguments
A blanket argument is not a genuine argument. It is a pseudo-reason that rests on ignorance. For example: “After Kant, nothing more can be said about the essence of things.” That is not an argument but an appeal to authority — and a false one at that. For it is no philosophical principle that everything a great thinker has said must be true. Truth cannot be established by appeal to authority, but only through insight into the matter itself. Blanket arguments rest not on experience and insight, but on ignorance of established facts about reality and of the evidence.
2.3.2 b) Tacit Prior Decisions
Often, what would first have to be proven is tacitly presupposed. For example: “Only what can be measured by natural science is real.” That is not a piece of natural-scientific knowledge, but a philosophical prior decision — and one that refutes itself. For the sentence “Only what is measurable is real” is itself not measurable. It is a metaphysical claim dressed up as science.
Such tacit prior decisions are especially dangerous because they often go unrecognized as such. Whoever thinks he has no philosophical presuppositions has a particularly large number of them — only unexamined ones.
2.3.3 c) Reductionisms
A reductionism occurs when one reduces something to something else and in the process loses or reinterprets essential aspects. For example: “The human being is nothing but a heap of atoms.” That is a reductionism, because it replaces the question of the essence of the human being with a physical description — and in doing so suppresses everything that makes the human being human: his thinking, his freedom, his capacity for love, his dignity.
Not every reduction is an illegitimate reductionism. There are sound natural-scientific explanatory models that trace certain phenomena back to simpler causes. It becomes unsound where states of affairs that obtain in reality are reinterpreted or explained away so that they fit the theory in question.
To know philosophically, one must be prepared to see through such prejudices and to set them aside. Not out of carelessness, but out of love of truth. This requires an intellectual upheaval, which Conrad-Martius described as a “completely new view of the world and a new world of the manner of research”.1
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Fußnoten
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Conrad-Martius, „Phänomenologie und Spekulation” (“Phenomenology and Speculation”, 1965), in: Schriften zur Philosophie, vol. 3, Munich: Kösel, 1965, pp. 370–384. German original: „völlig neue Weltsicht und Welt der Forschungsart”. ↩