Unknowingness
Ronna Burger
Richard Velkley
Oliver Sensen
Alison Denham
Bruce Brower
PA G E
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T U L A N I A N
FA L L
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What makes philosophy “puzzling and interesting over time,” says assistant professor Oliver Sensen, “is that maybe these questions are in a way too difficult for human beings to answer.” Sensen is writing a book on human dignity, particularly what it means in the work of Immanuel Kant. Dignity is considered a human value tied up with reason and free will. When he was a boy, Sensen wanted to be the wise man, the teacher of the action hero he’d seen in karate movies. He went into philosophy expecting to find concrete answers. Instead he found more questions. Questions such as what is mind and what is the soul may be, Sensen discovered, “way out of our reach.” You can use light to look at things, explains Sensen, but you can’t examine light by illuminating it. “Similarly, it might be that our consciousness, our mind, our soul is something that does the looking, through which we can look at things. But you can’t turn it upon itself and lighten the light itself and get an insight into what lighted it.” Kant is “big on this view that in principle there are things we cannot know,” says Sensen. Human beings may have the capacity to learn how to build airplanes and bridges, but then, says Sensen, “there are other things, like God, freedom and immortality, which we don’t really have knowledge of. We can have faith and belief and those things, and we might have other access, but we don’t really have knowledge.” For instance, it is impossible to with any certainty prove or disprove the existence of God. For 2,500 years, the smartest people in the world have asked questions about soul and freedom and God and morality, “and there’s no agreement,” says Sensen. “Kant’s point was then, well, maybe there’s in principle a problem with our knowing these things. In principle, human beings cannot answer these questions.”