Chapter 1: The Authentic Crisis of Contemporary Philosophy
Since its inception, philosophy has centered on several fundamental inquiries. These questions have not dissipated with the progression of history; rather, they have cyclically re-emerged within shifting forms of thought, gaining renewed urgency in every epoch. Regardless of the expressive medium—be it metaphysical, logical, empirical, or phenomenological—philosophy remains unable to evade the central fact: that all philosophical endeavor ultimately converges on the inquiry into "How is knowledge possible?" and "What is the world?"
Beginning with Plato, Western philosophy established a tradition of thought centered on rationality. Within this tradition, the Idea was understood as true Being, while the sensible world was relegated to an unstable, secondary, or even illusory manifestation. The task of knowledge was not to linger within experience, but to grasp the essential structure that transcends experience through the faculty of reason. From this point forward, philosophy gradually assumed a singular mission: to provide the ultimate ground for the intelligibility of the world.
As philosophy evolved, this mission was not abandoned but rather continuously reconstructed and intensified. In Spinoza’s system, the world was no longer merely a shadow of the Idea, but was understood as a necessary Whole, entirely graspable by reason. Nature is God; God is Nature. The order of the world was not hidden behind experience but could be clearly perceived through the deductive structures of rationality. Consequently, the world itself was systematically defined for the first time as an object that could be interpreted, proven, and fully understood.
However, it was precisely at the peak of this rational self-confidence that problems began to surface. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason did not aim to destroy reason, but to rescue it. By distinguishing between phenomena and the thing-in-itself, Kant demarcated an impassable boundary for reason: rationality could only exercise its legitimacy within the conditions of the possibility of experience. Cognition was no longer a direct grasp of the world’s ontology, but a transcendental prescription of the structure of experience. Reason thus attained an unprecedented status—it became both the condition for knowledge and the limit of it.
Yet, this demarcation did not conclude the philosophical inquiry; instead, it sharpened the conflict. Once the structures of reason were defined as transcendental, non-empirical, and unfalsifiable forms, they acquired an almost irrefutable authority. Reason was no longer merely a tool but became the yardstick by which all existence was measured. On this basis, Hegel attempted to further demonstrate that reason not only prescribes experience but is itself the very mode of existence’s unfolding. Logic is existence; existence is logic. The task of philosophy was no longer to restrict reason, but to allow reason to complete its thorough self-verification.
In this process, rationality gradually shifted from being a "way of knowing the world" to becoming the "reason why the world is so." While philosophy laid the foundations for science, it also quietly became the metaphysical backbone of scientism. The world was viewed as a rational structure capable of infinite interpretation and expansion, while human cognition was expected to continuously approach the complete expression of this structure.
Simultaneously with this rationalization process, however, ran a persistent echo of skepticism. The problem of the unknowable proposed by Hume did not lose its validity after Kant. Even if we acknowledge that cognition possesses a transcendental structure, we remain unable to definitively confirm whether these structures truly correspond to the world itself, or if they are merely the human mode of comprehending it. Our knowledge seems only able to advance through constant correction, yet it can never obtain the ultimate guarantee of its own inherent correctness.
It is within this tension that phenomenology shifted the gravity of philosophy. It no longer inquired whether there existed a thing-in-itself independent of consciousness, but focused instead on how the world manifests itself to consciousness. Knowledge was no longer understood as a replication of ontology, but existed as a relation—a generative process. The problem did not lie in whether the world could be fully grasped by reason, but in the fact that the world only possesses meaning for us within the scope of what is experienced and understood.
Wittgenstein pushed this reflection to its limit. Transcendental structures were no longer housed within reason but were traced back to the forms of language. Any content that can be understood must be capable of being spoken; and everything that cannot be spoken transcends the boundaries of philosophy.
