What may I hope? Mr. Schnädelbach – Remembering, Believing and Knowing

Remembering, Believing and Knowing

– Interview with Herbert Schnädelbach (from SH Milk Bowl 1.1)

[J. Bertzbach:] In your “Basic Course” on Philosophy, which you published with Ekkehard Martens, you start with the Kantian questions. You quote Kant: “All the interests of my reason”, that is Kant now, “the speculative as well as the practical, unites in the following three questions:  1. What can I know, 2. What should I do, 3. What may I hope?”. In the Lectures on Logic, Kant adds to this the question “What is the human being?”.

Kant: What may I hope? What is the human being?

In your last volume of essays, you talk about all four of Kant’s questions again, but then a question like “What can I hope for?” – quote from you: “is in no way basic” for philosophy. And then all that remains is “What can I know?” and “What should I do?” as the two basic questions of critical philosophizing. So, where are the two questions “What is the human being?” and “What may I hope?” left now?

[H. Schnädelbach:]  So “What may I hope?”, if you understand it with Kant, that’s the question of religion. That’s not meant in the sense of “I hope to win the lottery” or something like that, instead of course, this has to do with the idea of the immortality of the soul, with life after death and such.

And here I simply mean that through the privatization of religion, which has been going on since the 19th century, simply in the sense that religion has become a very personal matter today and there is actually no authority that still … at least, again in the West, … that can actually teach people what faith now is – that is my assessment so –, I do not believe that philosophy can contribute anything generalizable to this point.  So that’s why I think …, this religious-philosophical topic seems to me then to have stepped very much into the background.

“What is the human being?”

That’s of course a point of contention. I think it is a misinterpretation, which is now in vogue again, that one thinks that the question “What is the human being?” is the basic question of philosophy. I think that’s wrong.  That’s not the case with Kant either, which is why it is wrong! ( laughter )

Well, the point is simply this: The question “What is the human being?” concerns our self-understanding, so in the sense of “What kind are we actually?”, “Who are we?”; and this question can only then be answered if one already has answers to the questions “What can I know?”, “What should we do?”.

Primarily, one should always ask the question a little differently today.  One should ask the question more in the sense of “What can we know?”, “What should we do”. So this methodical individualism is certainly a thing that from today’s point of view has to be viewed more skeptically than it was the case with Descartes or Kant.

Well, if that is clear so far, then it means that the question about the human being, or about who or what we are, is perhaps a final question – or a follow-up question, but it can no longer be regarded as the basic question of philosophy, as it quite often happens. –

Plato: Knowledge is true justified belief?

In philosophical lessons you teach to understand ‘knowledge’ with Plato in reference to the “Theaetetus” dialogue. It is now established worldwide to define knowledge as “true justified belief” or “wahre, begründete Meinung” – this is what philosophers have agreed on following this dialogue.

Well the point, whether that goes back to Plato or not, isn’t so important, but rather first of all, it is about the question of what could be a convincing explication of our intuition concerning knowledge. And when one then comes to the point where you say “true justified conviction”, then one can say first of all: Knowledge is certainly a kind of conviction.

I don’t think someone would say, “I know something and at the same time I doubt it.”  So it is already, so to speak, a fixed conviction.  And now, of course, the question is, what must be added so that a conviction can count as knowledge? And there one must say first of all, it must be true! – And this has already Plato found. –

But then something is still missing, because it can be, for example, I am convinced that at the moment in Japan an earthquake takes place, and that is also “accidentally true”, it is taking place! But then I couldn’t say: “I knew it!” But: I guessed correctly. And that’s why the second condition is added, that one must also be able to give reasons. Well, in the “Theaetetus”, Plato rejects this too, as aporetic, that is, as hopeless, so is isn’t quite convincing.

So, and now the next question is: What could now philosophical knowledge be? What could knowledge be in philosophy? And it seems clear to me that our philosophical knowledge is not based on going out into the world and seeing what is the case. So that’s what the sciences do.

Instead: philosophical knowledge is just “thoughtful knowledge”, is so to say second-hand knowledge, [this] knowledge is knowledge that results from dealing with what is known – from critically dealing with what is already known.And then of course the question is so: “Are there philosophical truths?”.  One can perhaps be skeptical too and say it’s such an idea, such a goal that one might be striving for.But I would really like to strongly emphasize that in philosophy it is the arguments that count.

And that’s why I think: philosophical knowledge must be justified knowledge – that is, in the sense that someone has a reasonable reason to believe that something is such and such.  The thing that was just important to me was that – if one chooses to approach Plato – then one shouldn’t always see in Plato only the theory dictator or – with Popper – the alleged inventor of totalitarianism, but that for him it also has a political-critical function to face the teachings of Anamnesis and the Theory of Forms. –

Plato: Anamnesis, Wittgenstein: Recollection?

The “anamnesis” that Plato uses again and again, and Wittgenstein: “The work of the philosopher is a gathering of memories”. – Do these both characterize the role that you assign to philosophical knowledge?

Yes, so of course ‘anamensis’ in the sense of recollection – that’s a motif that can be found in Wittgenstein too, but of course just quite differently than in Plato.

Plato thinks that actually all our knowledge consists of recollection.  So, we have basically always known everything already and on certain occasions we only need to remember it again.  This is connected with his theory of the soul, the idea that our soul has seen the ideas in pre-existence. So, philosophically speaking, he means that all knowledge is “a priori”.  Right?

And with Wittgenstein, of course, it is meant a bit differently.  There it is about the recollection of what we have somehow forgotten, which brought us to confusion.  He means that the philosophical problem consists primarily in that, that we have lost the overview – in our thinking. And there he thinks that it is enough that we simply remember systematically what we actually already knew or understood in order to get out of this confusion.

What Wittgenstein wanted to rule out, first of all, is that one starts to look for “causes”, that is, that one, so to speak, imitates explanatory science in philosophy.  So that’s a commonality, but also a big difference between these two positions.

And I think that it is right – that the philosophical reflection consists very largely in the fact that we refer to what we – now let’s say with Heidegger – always already assume, what we have actually already accepted as valid; so that one thus can say: Well, this motif anamnesis is certainly very important in philosophy. –

And how is it political then?

Yes, so that’s Plato’s anamnesis teaching, which indeed has this political function, namely to remind the doubter that he cannot be right with his thesis that everything is just a matter of opinion.

Schnädelbach: “Wissen ist fehlbar!”

In my little epistemology introduction, I tried to take up the topic of getting knowledge from the grammatical side. Thus, to say: “Let’s first see how the basic epistemic expressions are actually used: knowledge, imagination, thinking, etc.?”.  And then we can still turn to questions of validity. –

You say you are a fallibilist, so similar to the philosopher Popper.  Yet you also say like Plato, it is not all merely a matter of opinion.  Please define briefly the foreign word ‘fallibilist’!

Yeah, ‘define’ –, perhaps it is enough to say what it means ( laughs ): A fallibilist is a philosopher who is convinced that our knowledge is fallible.  This is different from skepticism.  Skepticism says: “We can’t know anything, we won’t know anything!”, he actually no longer has any use for the expression ‘knowledge’.  So he says to himself: “There are just opinions, and we have to get by in life, with opinions.”  The fallibilist does not say that.

The fallibilist says: No, no, there is already knowledge, but we have to reckon with the fact that our knowledge – for example, that we believe it to be true with reasons – that this is fallible, that this is refutable, that it does not prove to be infallible for all eternity – it could be that there is an error in it;  and if the error is uncovered, then we might have an improved form of knowledge, but here again we cannot exclude in principle that then also new errors have come in again.

So, this difference is important between fallibilism and skepticism. And there is no contradiction in saying: “Knowledge is fallible”.  So the fallibilist, after all, insists that not everything is merely a matter of opinion, otherwise he would be a skeptic or ‘skepticist’, if one puts it better.  But the point is simply that the very conviction that not everything is merely a matter of opinion is exactly what, so to speak, “motivates” the fallibilist to search for the better thesis, for the better theory. –

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