W poszukiwaniu niepowątpiewalnego doświadczenia realnego bytu

Abstract

René Descartes did not prove the existence of external things equally unquestionably as he proved the existence of his own thinking ego. Neither did Immanuel Kant, in his The Critique of Pure Reason, find a sufficient proof of the reality of objects outside consciousness. Edmund Husserl was satisiled with the investigation of the objective field of pure, transcendental consciousness and he found the judgement on the real existence of the external world as belonging to the pre-philosophical „natural attitude” and thus not lying within the scope of interest of philosophy. The problem of the existence of the world turned out to be — according to the greatest thinkers of modernity — impossible to be proved by means of purely rational reflection. The main reason of its undecidability is the impossibility of constructing such a proof which would be formally correct from the point of view of the rules of logic and would be simultaneously based on the premises meeting the criterion of obviousness. The source of the failure of rationalism — of the failure which consisted in the inability to overcome the epistemological idealism — is the too narrow understanding of the notion of „obviousness” inherited after Descartes who recognised only the obviousness of the immediate perception of the immanent contents of consciousness. An alternative position assuming as the minimum limit of ontological reflection the obviousness of the fact of existence (// y a) which is not connected with the class of autothematic and reflective acts of consciousness is drafted by Emmanuel Levinas in his Le Temps et L'Autre.