In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

UNCERTAINTY VS. REALITY
There is a fear that truth may not be (and may never have been) available.
As a venerable ideal, truth is firmly present. But beyond that, people
long to perceive the world and its phenomena "such as they are"-that
is, without any perspectival distortions. They do not want such insight
and understanding to be subject to revision and historical change. They
still hope that the possession of truth will improve the conditions of
human existence. But the stronger such longing, desire, and hope grow,
the less realistic they appear. This situation directly affects the work of
most intellectuals, and it seems to have an impact on the behavior even
of those who do not care about philosophical arguments. In response to
this vanishing of truth as the ultimate criterion for knowledge, two
different attitudes are emerging. On the one hand, some intellectuals
complain that a world without truth is a chaotic world. They search for
the causes of this crisis and for ways to resolve it. On the other hand,
some thinkers, without repressing the knowledge of inevitable Uncertainty,
try to come to terms with it. They have set aside, postponed, or
deliberately neglected the question of how human cognition can reach
the ultimate level of truth, and they try to assess the value of any item
of knowledge exclusively according to the functions that it can fulfill for
human life and interaction. Rather than the classic binarism "true versus
false" (Luhmann, 167f£.), it is the distinction between "Uncertainty" and
"Reality" that shapes people's disparate responses to the vanishing of the
truth-criterion. If they do not complain about the consequences of this
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