What has happened so far (Rejection of the Given, no representationalist theory, a holism)

Was bisher geschah (what has happened so far): We tried to grasp the object of our knowledge. Nevertheless, we rejected a two-fold epistemological strategy, namely presupposing that the object is, on the one hand, known in our mind and, on the other hand, independent from our processes of knowledge. In a line with Robert Brandom's semantic reading of Hegel we develope a holistic, inferential approach in order to describe what is given to us or rather to describe what we produce.

Now some people might say that sensibility gives us all what we need: "What you see, is what you get." It might be obscure to them that philosophers still search for the real relation of a presupposed real objects and objects within the mind, but as Hegel analyzes, the concept of something that is simply sensed, in other words, merely given must lead to the curious result that our thoughts about it are empty. Since a merely given can include no information of what is given to the mind, there must be another approach to order our sensations. Even the most bottom concepts "this" and "now" cannot build a universal explanation of what is given to us.

We take this as an indication that a bottom-up-approach cannot work.

Since we have abandoned a mere sensibility, we are seeking for something that grasps the empirical object on a higher level. This means, the empirical given has to be higher than being merely an atomistic fact. This idea also expressed by Robert Brandom's is the idea that reality is in fact much more complex and not reducable to a mere atomism of sensation. What is known has to be thought in its spiritual construction. This includes a holism of how we approach the object as a species being. We are rather investigating the process of empirical grasping than investigating what the object is. This strategy will finally merge content and form into one knowable object which is identical with our way of how we know (I am overoptimistic here). The starting point for all conceptions of reality will therefore turn out to be a completed self-consciousness.