Back in print again in English, this concentrated and profound early work of Georg Kühlewind approaches, with reverence and insight, the mystery pointed to in the opening words of the John Gospel: In the beginning was the Word.
Kühlewind then shows how it is that the world, including human beings and their consciousness, is not originally a world of things but a world of words; that fundamentally the world has the structure of a text; and that it is therefore possible to read it like a text.
In demonstrating this, three different approaches or disciplines are continuously kept in mind: epistemology, psychology, and linguistics. What unites these is the phenomenology or "empiricism of consciousness" employed by the author who always speaks out of, and toward, experience.
Thus, this is no ordinary philosophical text, but a guide to philosophical experience: to the experience of cognition itself.
