How does the human being know the world? The question sounds simple, yet the answer a culture gives to it determines everything that follows — its relationship to nature, its science, its image of the human being itself. Academic philosophy treats epistemology as one discipline among many: a field with its own chairs, technical terms, and lines of dispute between rationalism and empiricism. But the question of how knowledge is possible at all cannot be confined to seminars. It reaches deeper than any method.
What Academic Philosophy Presupposes
In the academic world, one encounters epistemology typically as a question about the conditions of valid statements. Kant distinguished in his Critique of Pure Reason between what holds prior to all experience — the forms of understanding he called a priori — and what arises only through sensory perception (Kant, 1781). Rationalism and empiricism mark the two poles: knowledge from pure reason or from experience. This distinction has shaped Western epistemology for two centuries, and in many respects also constricted it.
For despite all differentiation, both schools share a common presupposition that is rarely named as such: the separation of subject and object. The knower stands opposite the world. They observe, order, judge — yet they do not touch what is known, and what is known does not touch them. Jochen Kirchhoff identified this blind spot of modern science as subject-blindness: the decoupling of phenomena from the living subjecthood of the knower (Kirchhoff, 1998). Conventional natural science constantly employs metaphysical hypotheses without identifying them as such. Its premises can no longer be questioned from within. Precisely there the philosophical work begins.
Like Is Known Only by Like
The older philosophical tradition knew a different epistemology. Its fundamental principle, stretching from Empedocles through Plato to Schelling: what I know, I must in some sense already be. Plato called this anamnesis — re-cognition. The soul recognises the ideas because it encountered them before birth. Knowledge is then not the acquisition of something foreign but the re-cognition of what was always already known.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling systematically unfolded this insight in 1800 in his System of Transcendental Idealism (Schelling, 1800). The same activity that is consciously productive in free action, he argued, is unconsciously productive in bringing forth the world. Nature and spirit are not two separate spheres but expressions of a single activity. For epistemology this means: I can understand nature because I do not stand opposite it but belong to it. As long as I am identical with nature, I grasp what living nature is.
Goethe brought this thought into concrete natural research. His formula of tender empiricism, “which makes itself most intimately identical with the object and thereby becomes true theory” (Goethe, 1833), describes a path of knowledge that bridges the gap between observer and observed. The intuitive judgement (Urteilskraft) that he practised in the Theory of Colours (Goethe, 1810) and his morphology was no mere sensitivity. It was a cognitive capacity: the ability to see the law in the concrete individual phenomenon without abstracting it.
Novalis expressed the same thought in his own language: “Inward leads the mysterious path. In us, or nowhere, is eternity with its worlds” (Novalis, 1802). The seat of knowledge lies where inner world and outer world touch. What one is meant to understand must develop organically within oneself.
Thinking That Feels
In Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s philosophical work, this tradition condenses into a specific path of knowledge: thinking empathy. The concept unites Schelling’s insight that every genuine thinking is simultaneously feeling, with phenomenological attention and bodily perception, into an attitude that arose from philosophical practice itself.
Thinking empathy does not separate intellectual analysis from bodily impression. It works with the distinction between living and dead thoughts: there are thoughts that circulate as abstract somethings in the mind, and those that carry a vitality one can feel. Whoever takes in philosophy with the whole body, not only with the intellect, notices something that has not yet been grasped argumentatively. The body recognises philosophical truth before the mind does. Gwendolin Kirchhoff describes this as a whole-bodily sensation: reading Spinoza’s Ethics (Spinoza, 1677), the breathing rhythm slows, deep concentration arises; with Bruno, a vitality bubbles forth; with Kant, attention withdraws from the body and narrows into a ring around the head.
This is not a mystification of reading. It is an epistemology that includes the whole human being and proves itself daily in practice. In philosophical accompaniment, such a whole-bodily impression arises, and the work consists in finding words for this felt impression.
Why This Is Not Mere History of Philosophy
The question of how knowledge is possible has practical consequences. Whoever reduces knowledge to data collection and logical processing builds machines that compute but do not understand. Whoever strips living subjecthood from the understanding of nature produces a science that can no longer reflect on its own presuppositions. The critique of science that Jochen Kirchhoff formulated is at its core epistemological: the absolutisation of mathematical fictions in theoretical physics follows the law of idea-displacement — from fiction to hypothesis, and finally to dogma (Kirchhoff, 1998).
Natural philosophy offers a different epistemological foundation. Its starting point is the identity of nature and spirit, not their separation. Whoever proceeds from this identity does not ask: how can an isolated subject know a world foreign to it? But rather: what happens when a being that belongs to the world immerses itself in it through thinking and feeling? Knowledge then becomes an act of participation — what Goethe called “a synthesis of world and spirit which gives the most blessed assurance of the eternal harmony of existence” (Goethe, 1833).
Whoever understands epistemology in this way enters a field that is exhausted neither by rationalism nor by empiricism. It is a thinking that cannot separate the question of truth from the question of the human being — and that gains its true depth precisely in this inseparability.
Sources
- Goethe, J. W. (1810). Theory of Colours [Zur Farbenlehre]. Tubingen: Cotta.
- Goethe, J. W. (1833). Maxims and Reflections [Maximen und Reflexionen]. Posthumous, in: Goethes Werke, Weimar Edition.
- Kant, I. (1781). Critique of Pure Reason [Kritik der reinen Vernunft]. Riga: Hartknoch.
- Kirchhoff, J. (1998). Was die Erde will. Munich: Diederichs.
- Novalis (1802). Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Posthumous, in: Novalis Schriften. Berlin: Reimer.
- Schelling, F. W. J. (1800). System of Transcendental Idealism [System des transcendentalen Idealismus]. Tubingen: Cotta.
- Spinoza, B. de (1677). Ethics [Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata]. Posthumous, Amsterdam.
Related Concepts
- Thinking Empathy — the mode of knowing that practises thinking and feeling as a unity
- Judgement — the capacity to recognise in the concrete what no schema can provide
- Natural Philosophy — the philosophical foundation of a non-reductionist theory of knowledge
- Critique of Science — the examination of the hidden premises of modern natural science