Vom König, der sich selbst die Krone stahl

Abstract

Abstract. Having stepped forward into the dawn of modern age, Renaissance Man found himself an utterly free individual in the centre of the world. But by developing modern sciences from there according to his very own perception, the attraction of the mathematically based idealism forced him to abstract from man’s intuitive perspective and contingency. This dualism between subject and object has not been overcome ever since. Hence, how can we deal with introspection, intuition, inwardness or reflection? Twentieth century philosophy offers quite few attempts to explain this: Such are Edmund Husserl’s lectures concerning the dualism mentioned and the crisis of mankind in its consequence, Martin Heidegger’s introduction to instantaneous and pre-scientific experience of being, Thomas Nagel’s illustrative considerations on how it might be like to be a bat and eventually the hermeneutic return enforced by thinkers like Hans-Georg Gadamer and Donald Davidson in response to the influential linguistic turn. I shall argue that man’s relation to modern science looks like a kind of strange loop: Although depending on man’s knowledge and creativity, modern science nevertheless seems to work the more effectively, the less it considers man’s life-bound contingency. But then it claims to know more about us than we do ourselves. Or, in other words, man of modern age is like a king stealing his own crown. Keywords: Observation of mental activity, scientific introspection, phenomenology, Steiner, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Davidson, hermeneutical approach, linguistic turn.