Whoever works within a frame of thought cannot see that frame of thought. Gwendolin Kirchhoff understands by this not the familiar change of fashion within science, but the break of the invisible presuppositions that an entire epoch holds for facts. This is no weakness of individual researchers but a structural property of scientific knowledge that Thomas S. Kuhn described in 1962 in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and which has since been negotiated under the concept of paradigm shift. A paradigm determines which questions count as meaningful, which methods as admissible, and which answers as satisfying. It thereby also determines what cannot be asked, may not be measured, and does not count as knowledge.
#Normal science and its blind spots
Kuhn distinguished normal science from scientific revolution. Normal science works within a paradigm: it solves puzzles whose solvability the paradigm guarantees. What cannot be solved counts at first as anomaly, then as technical problem, finally as marginal phenomenon. Only when anomalies accumulate and shake trust in the frame itself does a crisis break open from which a new paradigm can emerge. Decisive is Kuhn’s insight into incommensurability: old and new paradigm are not directly comparable because they use different concepts, hold different phenomena relevant, and apply different measures. There is no neutral standpoint from which it could be decided which paradigm is right.
For critique of science in the tradition of natural philosophy this insight is as valuable as it is limited. Valuable, because it shows that what counts as secured knowledge is always also an expression of the ruling frame. Limited, because Kuhn himself remained within the theory-of-science discourse and did not pose the question of what the paradigm ontologically excludes.
#What the mechanistic paradigm cannot ask
Jochen Kirchhoff described in Anti-Geschichte der Physik (1991) the foundations of modern natural science as vulgar-philosophical metaphysical settings that are not empirically verifiable. His analysis goes beyond Kuhn, because it not only describes the change-dynamic of paradigms but also questions the content of the ruling paradigm itself. Abstract natural science operates with what Kirchhoff calls methodological atheism and methodological geocentrism: the scientist brackets out their living humanity methodologically, and cosmology projects terrestrial laboratory conditions onto the entire cosmos, as if everything there were like here, only without life and consciousness.
This double bracketing is not incidental. It constitutes the object of research in such a way that the living cannot appear categorically. If you pose the question about the inner movement of an organism, the quality of a colour, the meaning of a cosmic order, you receive no answer within the mechanistic paradigm, because the question itself counts as unscientific. This is the point where Kuhn’s analysis falls short: he describes that paradigms exclude certain questions; contextual disclosure, as Gwendolin Kirchhoff understands it, names which questions the mechanistic paradigm excludes and why this exclusion remains invisible.
#Schelling and the other ground
Schelling formulated the basic thought already in 1800 in the preface to System of Transcendental Idealism: a system that completely changes and reverses the ruling view of things will find, even with the strictest proof, continued contradiction from those who cannot or will not grasp the evidence of its proofs (cf. Schelling, 1800, preface). The difficulty lies not in the argumentation but in the ground on which one argues. Whoever has never left the mechanistic ground can hear the arguments of natural philosophy but cannot understand them, because the concepts in which they are formulated make no sense within their paradigm.
Schelling’s Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797) formulate the alternative as ontological thesis: nature should be the visible spirit, the spirit the invisible nature. The system of nature is at the same time the system of our spirit (cf. Schelling, 1797, introduction). As long as the human being knows themselves identical with nature, they comprehend what living nature is. As soon as they separate themselves and, with themselves, everything ideal from nature, nothing remains but a dead object. This separation is the founding gesture of the mechanistic paradigm. Natural philosophy does not dissolve it through a better argument within the existing frame, but through the change of the ground itself.
#No paradigm shift without premise shift
Lewis Mumford described in The Myth of the Machine (1977) how deeply the axioms of mechanistic thinking are rooted: accepted as unassailable, generally taken as self-evident. The modern megamachine is not only a technical but an epistemic structure that reproduces its own premises and marginalises deviating forms of perception. Whoever wants to change the paradigm must first expose the premises on which it rests.
In philosophical work, as natural philosophy understands it, this premise shift happens not abstractly but in the concrete encounter with another thinking. Whoever reads Schelling’s natural philosophy, studies Goethe’s Theory of Colours, or follows Kirchhoff’s critique of cosmology makes an experience Kuhn describes as gestalt shift: suddenly the phenomena reorder themselves. What previously counted as anomaly or marginal problem moves to the centre. And what previously counted as secured knowledge turns out to be expression of a particular decision of thought that could also have turned out differently.
The paradigm shift that natural philosophy carries out concerns not a detail of the scientific worldview but its foundation: the question whether the cosmos is a dead mechanism or a living organism. This question no experiment can answer. It belongs to philosophy. And it decides what kind of knowledge may count as knowledge at all.
Whoever wants to engage with the presuppositions of reductionism finds there the methodical side of this analysis. The ontological foundation is unfolded by the entry on natural philosophy. The question of what happens when the ruling forms of thought become visible in concrete philosophical work is treated in the entry on contextual disclosure.
#Sources
Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press.
Kirchhoff, J. (1991). Anti-Geschichte der Physik: Grundlagenkritik und Alternativen. edition dionysos.
Mumford, L. (1977). Der Mythos der Maschine. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1797). Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1800). System des transzendentalen Idealismus. J.G. Cotta, Tübingen.