2.8 The Difference Between Opinion and Knowledge

2.8 The Difference Between Opinion and Knowledge

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: 2.8 Der Unterschied zwischen Meinung und Erkenntnis

What exactly distinguishes an opinion from knowledge?

An opinion is something one holds to be correct. One can have good or bad reasons for it. But an opinion always remains a matter of holding something to be correct: one is not entirely sure whether things really are as one thinks. Opinions can be true or false — but one does not know this with certainty.

Knowledge is something else. Knowledge means: one sees that something is so — and that it cannot be otherwise. One grasps a state of affairs that exists independently of one’s own thinking. One does not invent it; one discovers it.

A simple example: when you see that a part cannot exist without a whole, you have recognized something. You do not have an opinion about parts and wholes. You have understood how things stand. And you know: this could not be otherwise. It lies in the essence of a part to belong to a whole.

This seeing — this intellectual grasping of a state of affairs that really is so — is what philosophy calls insight. Insight is the true core of philosophical knowledge. Without it there would be only opinions, conjectures, and assertions. With it there is knowledge.

Now someone might object: can one not also be mistaken in a supposed insight? Of course one can. But the objection proves something decisive: whoever says one can be mistaken presupposes that there is a difference between illusion and truth. And in doing so he presupposes precisely what he wanted to deny: that there is truth and that we can, in principle, know it.

Whoever claims that there is no truth contradicts himself. For he claims, after all, that it is true that there is no truth. That is the “relativistic contradiction”: even the renunciation of truth presupposes truth. The claim “Everything is relative” is not itself meant to be relative. Whoever utters it makes an absolute claim to truth — and so refutes his own thesis.

Husserl formulated this point with unsurpassable clarity: “I cannot compel anyone to see what I see. But I myself cannot doubt; I see, once more, that any doubt here, where I have insight, i.e. grasp the truth itself, would be perverse.”¹ Either, says Husserl, one takes insight seriously — or one surrenders all reason. There is no middle ground.

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Fußnoten

1. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations, 1900), Erster Theil: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, Halle: Niemeyer, 1900, p. 143. German original: „Ich kann Niemanden zwingen, einzusehen, was ich einsehe. Aber ich selbst kann nicht zweifeln, ich sehe ja abermals ein, dass jeder Zweifel hier, wo ich Einsicht habe, d. i. die Wahrheit selbst erfasse, verkehrt wäre.“ ↩