Doubting everything or believing everything are two equally convenient solutions, both of which keep us from thinking. (Henri Poincaré)
 

Epistemic negativistic optimism

If you look at the history of human world and self-relations, then you realize that often not the best were the most connectable but the simplest. Under a negativistic optimism, or more precisely a transactionalistic negativistic development-open optimism, I understand less a closed philosophical doctrine than rather an attitude. After that, any answer to the question of truth, which in some way is simple, is wrong. Truth is thus unpleasant and uncomfortable, but nothing that is uncomfortable is true for that reason alone. Otherwise, there would be a comfortable way to determine truth. Analogously, the question of an eternal truth is not decidable, since justifications for their non-existence are not really easy, but they seem to me to be comfortable. But such a truth could not be static in any case. But what would life be, if you were always so precise with the truth? Moreover, in my view, there is hardly anything more comfortable than pessimism. This negativism thus goes beyond the negativism of Critical Rationalism of Karl Popper. In particular, in my view, all underlying distinctions of concepts develop through a social process of reciprocal and co-constitutive transactions. Analogous to the development of reciprocal and co-constitutive relationships, one could say that all who observe with the same distinctions are involved in a common semantic relationship network. On the other hand, I consider social constructivism as well as radical constructivism not self-applicable.

Furthermore, I advocate an anti-essentialism, but not an epistemological anti-fundamentalism. Although a solid epistemological foundation is impossible, at least because of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, an experimental one in the form of an experimental ontology might be practicable.

The most serious consequences has this negativism in the field of ethics. As morally highest, every human being has a co-responsibility for all living beings interacting socially with him based on free decisions. If this co-responsibility would not result from free decisions but from compensation needs such as a helper syndrome or a Messiah complex, it would be psychologically more questionable than morally valuable. The co-responsibility itself results from the transactionalist indissoluble connection to all living beings interacting socially with the subject. From my point of view, in a comparable way, Emmanuel Levinas speaks of an irrefutable demand of the other against the subject, but this embedded in theological considerations. Jean-Paul Sartre speaks of absolute responsibility as a consequence of total freedom, starting from individuals thought of as isolated.

However, such an ethical claim can never be completely fulfilled, especially not in a world decisively dominated by ignorance and foolishness. But even in an ideal world the complexity would be far too high, so it makes sense to distinguish between a general sense of responsibility and limited personal competencies.

Following Max Weber, this ethics can be interpreted as an interaction of an ethics of responsibility oriented on results and an ethics of conviction oriented on justice. In a non-ideal world with limited resources such as time or information, an ethic of conviction should be aligned with an ethic of responsibility. This requires, among other things, the willingness to make oneself guilty, in the sense of the ethics of conviction, from an unintentional situation. This can be made easier by an error culture in which errors are dealt with openly, honestly and with little sanctions. However, honesty is the most important point here, as the error culture would otherwise provide perfect excuses for careless or reckless people.

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