A wonderfully succinct quote from The Destiny Of Man by Nikolai Berdyaev:

“This is the tragedy of knowledge… existence is irrational and individual, but we can only know the rational and the general.”*

I love this reply to the problem of objectification, and subject/object split, which is so fundamental to Western thinking. Berdyaev mentions Kant and critical philosophy, but really he is reaching all the way back to Descartes.

From Nikolai Berdyaev’s The Destiny of Man

“Knowledge for [German epistemologists] is objectification. The knowing subject is not an existent; he is an epistemological and not an ontological entity; he is the bearer of ideal logical forms which are not human at all and whose connection with man is incomprehensible. Concrete reality disappears and is replaced the ‘subject and object’. The knower is not a self, not a concrete particular person, but an epistemological subject which is not human and does not exist but is outside existence and stands over against it. And that which he knows is not an existent either, but an object correlative to him and specially constructed for knowledge. Existence slips away both from the subject and the object. The very opposition of the two does away with existence. Objectification destroys life and being. If knowledge is objectified it can never reach its goal. This is the tragedy of knowledge which many philosophers have clearly recognized and formulated as follows: existence is irrational and individual, but we can only know the rational and the general.* The object proves to be utterly alien to the subject and opposed to it. They are logically correlative and cannot be separated one from the other, and yet they are forever opposed to each other.”