What Is Knowledge? — Scientific Method and Philosophy

Kant claims we never know things as they are in themselves (Kant, 1781, Kritik der reinen Vernunft). Nietzsche goes further: there are no facts at all, only interpretations (Nietzsche, 1887, Nachgelassene Fragmente). Between these two positions moves the entire modern reflection on knowledge — and most people who ask today about the nature of knowledge inevitably land at one of these answers. But what if both are right and yet both overlook something decisive?

Perhaps you know this feeling: you read a scientific text and everything sounds coherent. The data is correct, the method is clean, the conclusion is comprehensible. And yet something remains unsatisfied. As though you had been shown a perfect model of the world — but the world itself is missing from it. This feeling is neither naïve nor unscientific. It is a philosophical signal. It indicates that the question of knowledge reaches deeper than the question of the right method.

#What Does Knowledge Mean in Philosophy?

In everyday life we use the word knowledge casually. Someone says they had an insight after a conversation, meaning: something struck me, I understood something, a connection became clear. Philosophy uses the same term but means something different. It asks not what someone has recognised, but: what happens when knowledge takes place? What is the process itself — and what does it presuppose?

The scientific method gives a specific answer to this. It says: knowledge arises through observation, measurement, hypothesis formation, and experimental verification. What can be quantified and reproduced counts as known. What eludes the experiment falls outside the realm of the knowable. This answer is not wrong. It is rigorous, disciplined, and has led to enormous technical achievements. But it contains a prior decision that is rarely made visible as such.

Jochen Kirchhoff captured this prior decision precisely (Kirchhoff, J., 2019, “Was ist Erkenntnis?”): natural scientists do not interpret the world without presuppositions. They interpret it according to very specific premises — and these premises cannot themselves be questioned as long as one remains within the scientific framework. Conventional natural science constantly employs metaphysical hypotheses without identifying them as such. The assumption, for instance, that nature is a mute, passive object that can be interrogated under controlled conditions is not an observation. It is a philosophical decision that stands at the beginning of modern science and has been taken for granted ever since.

Francis Bacon, one of the founders of the scientific method, put it with disarming candour: nature must be put on the rack so that she yields her secrets (Bacon, 1620, Novum Organum). Whoever takes this image seriously recognises in it the fundamental attitude underlying modern science. Nature is not questioned but interrogated. Not treated as a conversation partner but as a resistance to be broken.

#What Is Subject-Blindness — and Why Does It Concern Us All?

What natural science has methodically bracketed out since Galileo is the knowing subject in its aliveness. The person who observes, measures, and calculates does so as an abstracted subject — as a pure recording instrument that disregards its feelings, its embodiment, its biographical depth. Kirchhoff calls this the subject-blindness of natural science (Kirchhoff, J., 2019). Not the whole human being knows, but a reduced knowing-subject that could be anyone because it is no one in particular.

This reduction has a price. The decoupling of phenomena from living subjecthood is disastrous and destructive in the long run, says Kirchhoff (Kirchhoff, J., 2019). What is lost is not some sentimental addition but precisely the dimension in which knowledge in the philosophical sense first becomes possible: the connection between the knower and what wants to be known. The human being as scientist and the human being in their aliveness are two different creatures — and only the second has access to what philosophy has always meant by knowledge.

Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, himself a physicist, once called this condition the steel skeleton of mathematical natural science (Weizsäcker, 1964, Die Tragweite der Wissenschaft). A framework of enormous load-bearing capacity that says nothing about what it feels like to live in the building. The method works — and precisely therein lies its seduction. Technical efficacy is taken as proof of the truth of the presuppositions. My computer works, therefore natural science is right. This fallacy is so widespread that it is scarcely recognised as one.

This sounds strange at first. We are accustomed to treating nature as an object — as something lying before us, waiting to be measured. But philosophy has known a different insight since its beginnings. Heraclitus was the first to formulate it: whoever explores themselves discovers the laws of the world (Heraclitus, Fragment B101). Self-exploration is not an alternative to knowledge of the world but its royal road. And Schelling radicalises this thought: whoever could write the history of their own life from the ground up would thereby have compressed the history of the universe into a brief inner concept (Schelling, 1797, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur).

#Is There Another Form of Knowing Nature?

Yes. And it is no less rigorous than the scientific — only borne by different presuppositions. Nietzsche pointed out that everything occurring in the human being — their feelings, their subjective experiences, their bodily sensing — when precisely observed phenomenologically, permits conclusions about the nature of the world. The human being is a source of analogies for the universe, writes Novalis (Novalis, 1802, Die Lehrlinge zu Sais) in a sentence that sounds poetic but contains a philosophical thesis: what I find in myself is also found out there. And what works out there also works in me.

Natural philosophy, as Schelling, Goethe, and German Romanticism understood it, rests on precisely this insight. It does not bracket out the subject but includes it. Goethe called his approach intuitive judgement — a knowing that does not work against the senses but penetrates to the essence of things through a sharpened, deepened seeing. The Theory of Colours (Goethe, 1810), his counter-proposal to Newton’s optics, is dismissed to this day as a poet’s error. Yet what Goethe presented with it was less a theory about colours than an epistemology: the demand not to dissolve phenomena into data but to grasp them as living appearances that communicate something to the beholder.

This communication is the decisive point. Natural philosophy assumes that nature is communicative — that it shows itself to the human being when they are ready to let themselves be shown. Schelling puts it thus: Nature shall be the visible spirit, spirit the invisible nature. The outer world lies open before us so that we may rediscover in it the history of our spirit. This is neither mysticism nor speculation but a hypothesis about the fundamental structure of reality that must prove itself in experience — and that many people, in the depth of certain moments, actually experience as true. Schelling called his own approach real-idealism: a path that makes full contact with reality while remaining open to spiritual expanse (Schelling, 1797).

#What Does It Mean That Knowledge Is Remembrance?

Plato was the first to formulate the thesis that knowing is essentially re-cognition — an anamnesis, a remembering of something the soul already knows (Plato, c. 385 BCE, Meno). This idea recurs in many traditions: in Buddhism as Buddha-nature, which shines forth when the coverings fall away; in Heraclitus as the self-knowing that simultaneously discloses the world.

Jochen Kirchhoff connects this ancient insight with a modern experience (Kirchhoff, J., 2019): knowledge is remembrance and at the same time something new. What is already there is not simply retrieved. It is transformed through the act of knowing itself. Whoever truly knows is changed by the knowledge — and thereby also changes what is known. It is a living process that sets both the knower and the known in motion. The individual human being knows far more than they know or suspect, says Kirchhoff (Kirchhoff, J., 2019). The task of philosophy is to uncover this buried knowledge — not through instruction but through an encounter in which something within the human being remembers.

This distinguishes philosophical knowledge fundamentally from the scientific finding. The finding leaves the researcher unchanged. They register a datum and move on to the next. Philosophical knowledge seizes the whole person. It does not work against feeling but through feeling — a synthesis that Schelling described thus: every genuine thinking is feeling (Schelling, 1797). Thinking empathy is neither mere sentimentality nor pure intellectualism but a thinking that empathises with its object and a feeling that thinks its way through to clarity. Only life can know life. Only spirit can know spirit. Whoever regards a counterpart merely as a dead object will find only dead things in it.

#How Can Knowledge Succeed?

If what has been said is true — if knowledge is more than data collection, if it includes the subject instead of bracketing it out, if self-knowledge and knowledge of the world go together — then a very practical question arises: what is needed for this process to succeed?

The answer lies not in a new method. It lies in an attitude. Goethe spoke of a tender empiricism that makes itself most intimately identical with the object (Goethe, 1833, Maximen und Reflexionen). The Kogi people of the Sierra Nevada distinguish living thoughts — those arising from connection with the whole — from dead thoughts that merely circulate in the intellect. And Faust, in his despair, yearns to know what holds the world together in its innermost being rather than rummaging through words (Goethe, 1808, Faust). What all these voices share is the insight that wisdom does not arise through the multiplication of knowledge but through a deepening of the way we know.

There is a gradation: the senses show us the surface of things, and this surface is full of optical illusions. The intellect orders and systematises, but it remains in the realm of concepts. Intuition — that knowing which grasps a connection without step-by-step rational deduction — reaches deeper. It is neither fantasy nor wishful thinking but a mode of knowing in its own right, anchored in the philosophical tradition since Plato, and placed at the centre of their thinking by Goethe, Schelling, and natural philosophy. Language itself preserves this insight: we say “in principle” and mean: according to the primal ground. We say “in and of itself” and unknowingly speak Hegel’s language. In everyday speech slumbers a philosophical depth that remains hidden from most.

Knowledge in this sense is a capacity laid down in every human being. It requires no special gift and no esoteric access. It requires openness, the willingness to transcend one’s own intellectual frame, and what is best described as ethical preparation: the willingness to let go of wanting to be right. Whoever clings to their position cannot perceive what reveals itself beyond that position. Whoever opens themselves — to them the world communicates, in moments that can be neither planned nor forced, but prepared for.

The famous Know thyself of antiquity means precisely this: whoever truly knows themselves in depth thereby recognises the fundamental laws of the world. Self-knowledge and knowledge of the world are not separate projects. They are the same path, entered from two sides.

If these questions touch you — if you sense that the question of knowledge is at the same time a question about your own life — then philosophy has something to offer that neither natural science nor psychology provides in this form. A thinking-space in which thinking and feeling are not separated. In which the world as a whole comes into view. In which you yourself are part of the answer. What this space can concretely mean is shown by philosophical consultation.

#Sources

• Bacon, F. (1620). Novum Organum. London.
• Goethe, J. W. (1808). Faust. Eine Tragödie. Tübingen: Cotta.
• Goethe, J. W. (1810). Zur Farbenlehre. Tübingen: Cotta.
• Goethe, J. W. (1833). Maximen und Reflexionen. Posthumously edited by Johann Peter Eckermann.
• Heraclitus (c. 500 BCE). Fragments. Cited after Fragment B101 and B119.
• Kant, I. (1781). Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Riga: Hartknoch.
• Kirchhoff, J. (2019). Was ist Erkenntnis? Wissenschaftliche Methode & Philosophie. YouTube: Jochen Kirchhoff [msqlr1nZLuA].
• Kirchhoff, G. (2019). Was ist Erkenntnis? Wissenschaftliche Methode & Philosophie. YouTube: Jochen Kirchhoff [msqlr1nZLuA].
• Nietzsche, F. (1887). Nachgelassene Fragmente. In: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari.
• Novalis (1802). Die Lehrlinge zu Sais. In: Schriften, ed. Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck.
• Plato (c. 385 BCE). Meno. Cited after Stephanus pagination.
• Plato (c. 380 BCE). Phaedo. Cited after 96a.
• Schelling, F. W. J. (1797). Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel.
• Schopenhauer, A. (1819). Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Leipzig: Brockhaus.
• Weizsäcker, C. F. von (1964). Die Tragweite der Wissenschaft. Stuttgart: Hirzel.