Chapter 13

The Shallow and the Deep Reflection

We can now explain more clearly what we mean by the relative semblance of "knowing," by the intentionality of "science," and by the counter-intention of true metaphysics.

It is not enough to say that thinking posits the point that remains identical with itself, to which flowing reality can be related. We determine the full situation only when we add that in this manner, the thinking self carries its own counterpart into reality.

With each fact it finds, the discovering self projects itself into the judged world. Objects are alienated subjects. Being in general is alienated spirit.

Hence, "knowledge" is the result of a logocentric reinterpretation of the real—and if only humanity serves as the place for the Logos, also an anthropocentric one.

The belief in facts on one side and the belief in concepts on the other are only different forms of a logistical world enthusiasm, in relation to which the so-called animistic world ensoulment from prehistorical times would appear far less "subjective." Myth could refute science more easily than science could refute it.

This is the fundamental charge: that science, far from being the neutral discovery of objective reality, is actually the systematic projection of spirit's own nature onto the world—a remaking of reality in the image of timeless being.

If myth wanted to refute science, it could only do so in the form of judgment and would thereby commit itself to the law that obliges us to acknowledge every "fact" as long as it is demonstrably established.

We call science a system of judgments insofar as it finds its support in facts. If one denies the evidential power of facts, one has renounced judgment itself and can henceforth neither prove nor dispute anything.

Even if one were able to avoid objectification, one would at the moment have lost the ability to determine the least about truth and falsehood. Not even the assertion that the judging condition is something intentional could be upheld, since it would already presuppose judgment.

This self-evaluation, which clings to even the most modest scientificity, has not been sufficient to refute enthusiastic prophecies, but it has discouraged the historically rare mythical thinking from offering substantial counter-explanation.

The defense is formidable. Science cannot be refuted on its own ground because refutation itself requires the very judgmental apparatus science provides. We must therefore enter the realm of science itself to determine whether a tendency has formed the basis for the distortion of truth.

How should counter-explanation be articulated? It would bring to light, without shaking those sentences in the least, only the ulterior motive they conceal: It is one thing to translate reality into the language of facts, and quite another to consider it a fact itself. If someone judges in the presence of a tree that a tree stands here, he is logically indisputably right, but metaphysically wrong if he considers the noumenon tree to be a phenomenon and thus a reality.

All truths are equally valuable or equally worthless if we only assess their truthfulness. We have no measure to evaluate truths as long as we only consider the finished truth instead of the process through which it comes into existence.

But if we do this, a difference arises that forces us to distinguish two very different classes of truths.

Place yourself in a state of most primitive ignorance, such as that of a child or early humanity. From case to case it is the alienating experience that causes the drive for objectification to be aroused. We attribute such tendency to the name of a questioning of reality and consequently call the finding simply the fulfillment of a question of reality.

Searching and questioning align better with "sensing" than with observing or calculating. Sensing is closely related to "contemplating" and "speculating," which science usually refers to only as degenerations of the pursuit of knowledge.

Now consider this crucial dynamic: Whenever we have found something—established a fact—the conditions for further searching are immediately given, which peculiarly lead us step by step away from reality, the more we indulge in it.

Because in reality everything is interconnected, as if embedded in a medium of uninterrupted continuity, the discoverable solid we call a fact must be related to all possible facts in such a way that only a complete system of facts satisfies the drive for knowledge, even if it was initially concerned with just one of them.

It is in the nature of the found fact to drive the ability to question to discover ever-new facts, transforming the original curiosity into the very different interest in establishing calculable relationships between fact and fact.

The more the mind follows this compulsion, the more it becomes—instead of the compelling force of an experienced reality—the demanding force of an experienced fact that gives rise to discovering further facts. Reality is looked at only indirectly, namely insofar as it might be suitable to connect with already established facts.

Thus in the end, the scientist's will for objectivity is held together with reality by only a thin thread, which becomes thinner as the amount of judgments has grown which he must use in order to reach a judgment.

The discovering experience is widely displaced by the discovering knowledge, and the experienced itself is displaced by the merely learned.

Consider the typical scholar of the old and best style, who surpasses today's average with the double glory of strict conscientious thoroughness and lack of so-called practice. One cannot avoid admitting that he generally lost not only his own life but life itself behind a dense mesh of mere knowledge and formulas, whose shadowy nature he could not change even if they all had the advantage of being correct.

We express the situation differently by saying: every judgment sentence conveys its meaning, but not the experience that originally enabled its discovery.

The thought movement through which Galileo discovered the laws of falling bodies includes a wealth of experience of which the physics student knows nothing, even if he has already understood perfectly that a body sliding down an inclined plane reaches the same final velocity as in free fall from the same height.

Not only truths of philosophy but also of science have, at the moment of their discovery, a weight of meaningful depth that we can never rediscover, even with the most devoted immersion, when they belong to the armory of knowledge transmission for centuries, or even just decades.

Knowledge incessantly turns into learning. But the process of gaining knowledge—discovery—remains profoundly different from the process of learning what has been discovered.

Striving only to continue building on traditional propositions in the direction of least possible resistance to objectification, science turns away from any reality as soon as it barely possesses a formula suitable for linkage, to henceforth consider it as if it were a reality.

However, this has taken a path not so much toward deepening knowledge but rather toward increasing the abstraction of knowledge and expanding the scope of application for a moderate number of basic concepts.

The consequences of this trajectory are striking. The quantity available today of mechanical, optical, acoustic knowledge stands in downright glaring disproportion to the scantiness of our knowledge of the nature of motion, color, sound—even of cause and force.

The mathematical fluency in higher calculations contrasts almost ludicrously with our nearly complete ignorance of the origin and significance of the concept of number.

And who would deny that science can be life-crushing ballast when one dares to compare the hopeless ignorance with the towering debris of daily growing historical tradition, in which we find ourselves to this day regarding the driving forces of people's lives and the meaning and course of cultural processes?

Let no one consider this as something not yet achieved: it is not attainable at all with the questions and research methods of conventional science, and it could have been achieved centuries ago with a thousand times smaller expenditure of knowledge resources in the hands of life-saturated contemplation.

The more research renounces experience, the more it distances itself from reality and the more it falls victim to the false wish image of an all-leveling concept of magnitude.

It is not going too far to claim that humanity has never been more distant from experiencing space than in its capacity as the measuring geometer, never more distant from experiencing the stars than in its capacity as the calculating astronomer.

What distinguishes the scientific mindset from the unscientific one is much less the ability to repress emotional needs than the cultivated tendency to research through the sole exercise of reason and the broad exclusion of experience.

We have gained the ability to calculate everything and lost the ability to experience anything.

We want to call a truth known if its possession is the result of a finding experience, but only learned if it merely required learning to partake of it.

If we consider that one and the same truth can be both known and understood, then the justification of the statement at least somewhat illuminates that every judgment, whether true or false, is based on either shallow or deep reflection. Accordingly, knowledge development gravitates either toward increasing knowledge or deepening insight.

The previous logic and science theory knows nothing of deep and shallow reflection because, being logocentric itself, it knows nothing of the life source of discovery and is therefore completely unable to find a criterion for evaluating truths.

We are given guidelines for verifying the completeness of a proof procedure, investigation rules for individual research fields, and at best certain principles for weighing the importance of a sentence in the overall system of sciences. But the question has never even been raised, let alone answered, whether completely different research motives lie behind the allegedly impartial "search for truth," from which it can first be decided what degree of essentiality the findings possess.

We now claim that so far only shallow reflection has been able to establish itself as "science," whereas deep reflection is increasingly in danger of losing the claim to universal validity of its propositions altogether and sinking to the level of ornamental play with arbitrarily expansive and at best personally satisfying assumptions for the reason-faithful consciousness.

Whatever concept we possess, it is as a concept of something and always the same. Not only is every number what it is, equally for the Babylonian of antiquity as for the American of modern times, but also the color red, the tone C-sharp, the thing, the body, the period of two minutes, similarity, diversity, multiplicity, equality, uniformity, possibility, anger, belief, doubt, love, hatred, faith.

But if reality flows through time, continuously changes, neither persists nor returns—if it is a constant coming and going of eternally original and unfathomable worlds—then it cannot be experienced a second time: the same number, the same time magnitude, the same tone, the same diversity, the same anger, even if it is thought again and again.

An insurmountable abyss opens up between the tendency of our being which compels us, day by day, generation by generation, century by century, to fit ever more firmly the time-removed growing structure of the noumenal, and that sphinx-like threatening necessity which drags generation after generation into the maelstrom of decay.

The spiritual view into this abyss generates an amazement and contemplation which, when it forms and consolidates, is called metaphysical knowledge. In it, man understands himself as a double being: as a bearer of spirit and a bearer of life.

He feels, even if he can no longer recognize it, that the spirit dwelling within him is a stranger in the world of events, that the form of existence of tangible things only reflects back to him the world-penetrating ray of the persistence-craving ego, and that reality has long since slipped away from the primal judging when he believes he has captured and solidified it in judgment.

If one wants a rounded formula: historical man is under double compulsion—either to bind life in the spirit or to release the spirit in life.

Depending on whether in him the spirit rules over life or life over the spirit, his striving questions either aim to find being in occurrence or, supported by the sign language of being, to find his way back from it into the admittedly incomprehensible world of events.

Along one path, facts and their relationships are gathered and collected. Along the other, one leads from case to case to the discovery of their essence.

The former is progressive and logocentric in mind, the latter contemplative and biocentric.

The supposed impartiality of "searching for truth" is a pious deception, concocted by shallow reflection to cut off deep reflection's claim to science.

There is so little unintended questioning that rather the state of questioning is the purest expression of intellectual "tending," and this inevitably serves either life or logos.

With the either-or of "true" or "false," nothing has yet been decided about which necessity the system of findings is a testimony: whether it is the will to objectify the world and take possession of it through the comprehending mind, or the will to re-mix what is merely objective and create awareness of the unpossessable essence.

There is at least a methodical means to break the chains of conceptuality into which our poetry and striving were forged long before we awoke to clear consciousness of ourselves: the reflection on the content of names.

Man would not be a thinking being if he were not a speaking one. The wording is a natural point of contact for the research direction that aims at regression to the experience content.

If we uncritically succumb to traditional concepts, we are in danger of seeking reality in the wrong place and filling the gaps in our experience with the products of the appropriation work of the logos.

The "genius of language," if it were a sentient being, would hardly perceive without malicious pleasure that those who are deeply imbued with the mechanical constitution of the universe unknowingly testify daily to the anthropocentric origin of their belief when they consider non-human nature to be legally regulated.

The "laws of nature" extend exactly as far as the sphere of influence of the human will extends. And it is understood that one could not master what one has not discerned some features of its real nature.

We stand at a crossroads: shallow reflection that accumulates facts while losing reality, or deep reflection that penetrates concepts to rediscover the living experience they merely indicate. The choice is not between truth and falsehood, but between two kinds of truth—one that serves the spirit's will to possess, another that serves life's will to be.