Philippine E-Journals

THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLD

Wolf Dietrich

Discipline: Philosophy

 

Abstract:

Man's encounter with the world around him is generally governed by his consciousness. What he knows about the world is itself a consequence of his consciousness, as is his need to know about the world. For it is human consciousness, in the first place, that divides the world into an objective sphere and a subjective sphere which are subsequently reduced to interacting with each other. Knowledge is merely one consequence of this interaction. The quest for knowledge must be regarded as an attempt by the human organism to regain access to a world of which it was once an integral, but unconscious, part. The advent of human consciousness separated individual man from the world, making him "subjective" while rendering the world "objective." This Subject-object dichotomy must be called the basic fact of human consciousness. Man is aware of "existing" precisely to the extent that he is not a part of the world, but a separate entity governed by different laws. And he can know only what he is not, in other words, the world of objects; for all knowledge, by definition, springs from Subject-object relationships.