Anni Kolehmainen
Ressun lukio
Opettaja Juha Savolainen
4.
"Cogito ergo sum",
so the first step towards understanding and critical assessment of one's
being is to recognize the ultimate thinking self. The next step is the
expanding of one's consciousness to cover the rest of environment and in
the final phase on the road to higher perception is to start evaluating
the objects and concepts one now has become conscious of. According to
Karl Popper, this sort of level of consciousness and tools enabling an
individual to formulate and modify his inner concepts is something granted
only to the human race. It is something that is lacking from a one-celled
being, which should therefore get closed outside all philosophical
discussion.
The argument that a human being is without further
doubts aware of his own theories and aims to eliminate all mistakes from
them includes an apparent paradox. If we indeed possess abilities, which
enable us to evaluate again and again our own ideas of reality and all
achieved knowledge does that not mean that we recognise ourselves as
somewhat coherent beings who inarguably have all the tools the critical
tools and understanding of everything requires? It is true that compared
with the amoeba and naturally most other even more evolved species, our
thinking has undoubtedly reached the category of its own. Yet on the
universal scope should we really take for graned the superiority of our
minds? If we consider ourselves evolved enough to fundamentally create and
modify stable concepts, does that not mean that, in a way, we have already
overcome the final challenge of our evolution?
The ability to picture and nail down concepts is
regarded as a square one to all critical discussion. The word "discussion"
might be distractive, because it has been even scientifically argued that
thinking does not require language. So that brings us to question the
theory that the mere existence of language, which enables us to define our
concepts more clearly, grants us also a deeper understanding of it all.
Popper surely has a valid point when he states that
expectations and hypotheses cannot be critically observed if they are not
even pictured. That may be the case with an amoeba, but what guarantees
that there is something to us humans as well which goes beyond our
perception? Making even the simplest of premises requires that we have set
certain limits and facts to the reality within which we operate.
According to Immanuel Kant, the basis of all our
perception is formed by the twelve categories of understanding. They
include e.g. the innate need to perceive things in time and space. Hence
the ability to perceive something in something requires awareness of the
source of the perception, that is to say the thinking being itself.
We also have two sources in which to base our
concepts and "truths". We can either try to perceive things "empirically",
that is to say through our senses, or "rationally" which means relying on
pure reason. Combination of these two does not make us a "higher being"
itself but together with language they do form a rather inspiring basis
for our search of ultimate answers.
After all, it can be seen as an innate need for
humans to complete their overall horizon of thought as profoundly as
possible. So if the constant questions of acquired knowledge would really
become a distinguishing and dominating feature in us, our evolution could
take a bigfoot's step forward. We could start by providing every toolbox
with Hume's guillotine to stirp [strip? - toim.huom.] thing back to the
basics. Because our desire towards a coherent perception of the world is
highly dependent on other concepts, we should do our best to not let
critical assessment to become a semantic puzzle. Though we may not be
entirely aware of all of our complicities, unlike amoebas, we perceive at
least a part of them.
