Abstract
In his philosophical research, Vasily Sesemann proved that the natural sciences were not the sole domain of knowledge. He criticized Neo-Kantian philosophy and argued that the subject of knowledge could not be an abstract scientific mind. Cognition involves direct intuition. The knowing subject acts directly in the world, which is why knowledge is always related to attitudes. A person knows himself not as a theoretical object, but as a non-objectifiable, personal life. Therefore, man must follow not only reflective knowledge, but also pre-reflective self-consciousness. The knowledge that an incarnate and worldly, agential subject can be connected not only to conscious activity, but unconscious activity as well. Sesemann rejected the Neo-Kantian reduction of being into logical thinking. He argued that rationality is always related to irrationality, and pure knowledge is related to attitudes. I first discuss how Sesemann understands intuition and criticizes the naturalistic account of scientific knowledge. I then analyze how Sesemann’s theory relates knowledge to attitudes. Finally, I discuss the genesis of knowledge as the transcendence of one’s point of view and how objectifying knowledge is related to linguistic expression and in this context argue that Sesemann’s analysis of knowledge is similar to Husserl’s genetic phenomenology.
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Notes
- 1.
The crucial passage: “Scientific knowledge acquires a strict ‘objectivity’ and independence from the real, ‘psychic subject’ purely because it eliminates [ausschaltet] any relation to the real subject from Being, which is what it seeks to cognize from the very beginning, any relation to the real subject. … This is not about a simple refraining disassociating from the subject’s acts (its positions and attitudes), but about eliminating everything that these acts are aimed at, i.e., what they are objectively and ontically founded on” (translation mine).
- 2.
The crucial passage: “Therefore, the subject can also know about experience and its contents only if it knows itself, i.e., any knowledge of an experience is essentially related to immediate self-consciousness and self-awareness, and only such a form of self-awareness is possible” (translation mine).
- 3.
“Thus, we conclude: any mechanicism or positivism—to the extent that it claims to be the sole, scientifically based worldview—does not acknowledge that it is conditioned by and yoked to the objectifying attitude, which is only one of many possible attitudes; i.e., it bases itself on the illegitimate identification of Objectifying knowledge with pure or absolute knowledge (to the extent that it acknowledges such a thing at all)” (translation mine).
- 4.
“A purely objectifying attitude is only natural to and predominant among Europeans; it is not so for primitive peoples, as Levi-Brühl demonstrated in his fundamental study of the thinking of primitive peoples. Purely objective attitudes do not play such a comprehensive and significant role in primitive thinking” (translation mine).
- 5.
“However, the ‘point of view’ is a specific gnoseological—not logical—concept, whose function consists in determining, knowledge’s dependence upon both to the object and to the subject. It is dependent upon the object because every ‘aspect’ of it (to the extent it bears any value for cognition) is rooted in the object and represents the object itself, albeit perspectivally and incompletely. It is dependent upon the subject because the aspect of the object is never purely and perfectly reflected, but is always perceived as an adumbration manifesting itself within a perspective, always only ever in specific profiles, determined by the subject’s point of view” (translation mine).
- 6.
“The insight into the perspectivality of a perspective there always implies the possibility to overcome its limitation and to transition to another view point” (translation mine).
- 7.
“In seeing a materially extended cube, for example, I can ask what is given. It would be basically erroneous to answer that the perspectival side of the cube is given, or even that the ‘sensations’ of it are given. The ‘given’ is the cube as a whole—as a material thing of a certain spatio-formal unity that is not split up into ‘sides’ or ‘perspectival aspects.’ That as a matter of fact the cube is only visually given, and that visual elements in the content of perception correspond only to such points of the seen thing—of all this, nothing is ‘given,’ just as the chemical composition of the cube is not ‘given’” (Scheler 1973, p. 55–56).
- 8.
“It should not be forgotten that attitudes do not play a strictly negative but also a positive role in the cognitive process. It not only limits the subject’s field of vision, not only rendering it blind in relation to certain phenomena, but also opens the possibility for him to see specific fields of objects, to be receptive to specific cognitions” (translation mine).
- 9.
“The peculiar power of knowledge is manifested not only by its being directed to a transcendent being-in-itself, but also by its ability to transcend itself, to negate itself, but without being destroyed, without ceasing to be what it is. Therefore, concepts such as ‘unknowable,’ ‘unthinkable,’ ‘unconscious’ and the like are perfectly possible and meaningful, even if the precise determination of their meanings in each case each time requires special phenomenological study” (translation mine).
- 10.
“Without a doubt, the dependence that exists between objectifying thinking and knowledge on the one hand and linguistic consciousness on the other is by no means one-sided. While linguistic form arises from out of objectifying consciousness, the linguistic form also affects the development of objectifying thinking. … Language, which was originally the starting point for the free development of thinking, is now turning into the chains that bind it” (translation mine).
- 11.
“The problem of style to philosophy is not peripheral to philosophy (as it is to science), but a profound and even central problem, which is thematically and firmly connected to the essence of philosophy. The linguistic expression, to the extent it is merely a conceptual sign, can only more or less adequately reproduce and fix objectifying knowledge, but it is essentially incapable of doing this for include essence of non-objectifying knowledge. As soon as it is a question of the latter, the conversation is about the latter, it is not a matter of fixing its content, it is important not only to capture it richly, but above all of pointing to the attitude that opens up access to the intended being, and, indeed further, of making that attitude palpably intuitive, more—it is necessary to allow to experience this attitude live, as if reproducing it ins status nascendi” (translation mine).
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Jonkus, D. (2020). Vasily Sesemann’s Theory of Knowledge, and Its Phenomenological Relevance. In: Płotka, W., Eldridge, P. (eds) Early Phenomenology in Central and Eastern Europe. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 113. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39623-7_6
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