Werner Ulrich's Home Page:  Picture of the Month

Now "Ulrich's Bimonthly"

July, 2004

Nordic transparency, or: Kant's quest for critique Nordic summers in Europe can be beautiful – sometimes! Transparent skies, long hours of light, fresh air, clear water, scenic beauty, the simplicity of outdoors life … everything becomes a symbol of lightness and lucidity. A perfect occasion for reflecting about the philosophical ideal of lucidity, as opposed to our rather impoverished everyday notions of scholarship and criticism.

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Lucidity: a philosophical dream  Transparency, clarity, lucidity are the positive opposites of deceptive appearance, obscurity, illusion. They are virtues that ideally distinguish and enlighten our capacities of observing and reasoning, whether in everyday argumentation or in scholarship.

Kant: foremost critic of the "Schein"  If there is any single philosopher who represents the human quest for enlightenment, for uncovering illusion and gaining lucidity, it is probably Immanuel Kant, the philosopher of illusion (Schein) par excellence. His Critical Philosophy is one giant effort to help us den Schein aufzudecken, that is, to uncover the illusion to which human experience and reasoning tend to submit unless we discipline them through a constant effort of critique.

  
Immanuel Kant
1724-1804

Critique: the road towards lucidity  Over two hundred years ago, Kant noted with remarkable foresight: "Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit." However, critique as Kant understood it is very different from the superficial concept of criticism that characterizes our epoch. Rather than derogating the efforts of others, it means a careful, relentless self-examination of one's own claims, including those underpinning criticism. "It is a call to reason to undertake anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a tribunal which will assure to reason its lawful claims, and dismiss all groundless pretensions." (Critique of Pure Reason, Preface to the first edition of 1781, p. xi) 

Radiant Lofoten Islands  This month's picture symbolizes the theme of transparency as well as any other of which I can think. Given that this year's Nordic summer has been rather variable (not to say lousy) thus far, I remembered a beautiful trip to the north of Scandinavia that my wife and I undertook in 1993. To the radiant experiences of that trip belonged the Lofoten Islands off the north-western coast of Norway. The picture shows the harbor of Henningsvaer on a clear summer day, around noon.

Technical data  Photograph taken on 25 June 1993 with a conventional reflex camera, ISO 200 negative film, 28 mm wide-angle lens, shutter speed 1/250 second, aperture f/8, scanned from a 13 x 19 cm color print with 1104 x 745 pixel; current resolution 828 x 559 pixel, compressed to 104 KB.

„Um Irrtümer zu vermeiden, muss man die Quelle derselben, den Schein, zu entdecken und zu erklären suchen. Die Aufdeckung und Auflösung des Scheins ist ein weit grösseres Verdienst um die Wahrheit als die direkte Widerlegung der Irrtümer selbst.”

(„To avoid errors, one must search for their origin in illusion. 
Uncovering illusion is a much greater service to truth
than any direct refutation of errors.”)

Immanuel Kant, Vorlesungen über die Logik (1800)

Last updated 9 July 2004 (first published 8 July 2004)
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