Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Zahlen, Rechenoperation

Kurzinhalt: Zahlenreihe 1, 2, 3 ..:Grundzahl 1; Zahlen als Wesen und Ergebnis von Rechenoperationen

Textausschnitt: 35/1 Students start out thinking that numbers have a single, fixed meaning, such as the number 4 which gets its assigned meaning from being counted or numbered after 3 and before 5. But, if you think of 4 as a sum (i.e., 3 + 1 = 4), then you are paying attention to the way the number is generated, which means that you have shifted attention away from the number and focused instead on the process of generating numbers through different operations. In this context the number 4 may be transformed from a sum (3 + 1 = 4) into a remainder (5 - 1 = 4), or into a product (2 X 2 = 4), or into a quotient (8 : 2 = 4). Once you understand that numbers are the way they are because of the operations that generated them, you can make the dramatic shift from defining terms or concepts to defining the operations that generate the terms or concepts. Instead of asking about the properties of a circle, you can ask about the properties of the operations that make circles to be the way they are. Thus, the definitions x2 + y2 = r2 may be identified as an equation in the second degree where the term 'second degree' refers to the type of operation that generates such geometrical forms as circles or squares or, more generally, numerical terms such as powers and roots. (25; Fs) (notabene)

36/1 This is what happened to mathematics in the nineteenth century. Mathematicians shifted their attention away from (i.e., abstracted from) the different types of numbers and started paying attention to the operations that generated those numbers. Thus, they made the discovery that the operations could be correlated to one another into a group, and that different groups generated different classes of numbers and had different ranges or powers of systematizing these objects. Finally, they grasped that there was a series of systems - like arithmetic, algebra, analytic geometry, and calculus - where successive systems were built upon prior systems by extending the range of objects that could be generated and combined with one another.1 (25f; Fs)

37/1 Such a series of systems that transformed and transcended prior systems provided scientists with the possibility of defining the notion of development in a radically new way. It was this possibility that Piaget and contemporary evolutionary theories have explored. More important, it is this distinction between an operation and the contents formed by that operation that has made possible the method that we are pursuing of inviting you to study your own operation of understanding, where attention shifts from 'the understood' to your own activity of understanding, which generates and forms the contents that you have understood. It is my purpose in this work not to study mathematics or science, but to study this act of understanding that has mediated and made possible the remarkable advances in these and other fields. (26; Fs)

38/1 Besides the kind of direct insights that we have been examining here, there is the rare, but even more unique, type of insight called 'inverse insight.' (26; Fs)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Materie, als nicht intelligibel

Kurzinhalt: Am Beispiel der Vorsokratiker Aufweis einer falschen Fragestellung; inverse Einsicht; vgl. Freud (s. Text)

Textausschnitt: In other words, the pre-Socratic thinkers were assuming that there was some sort of underlying, formless matter that took on different forms, whereas it was just the opposite. Matter is simply not understandable in itself ...

() The Pythagoreans did not reverse these answers; rather, they started Greek thought off on a whole new line of inquiry by making new discoveries. For example ...

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Materie, endlose Zahlenreihe

Kurzinhalt: Die Ursache der Imagination des Unendlichen liegt in der "Hypostasierung" der materia; nicht die materia ist die Form, sondern die Zahl

Textausschnitt: To understand 'infinitely' is to understand everything about everything. Let us take the example of the ordinary number series, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. Since the series can continue indefinitely, you may assume that 'infinity' is a number that belongs to this series. But the form of such a series is a series of terms generated by adding to any number the unit one (n + 1). This is a very limited form of operating. What is endless or infinite is the matter or numerical possibilities that can be extended continuously by the operation of adding.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: common sense; law, proverb

Kurzinhalt: common sense; Beispiel am Unterschied von Gesetz und Sprichwort

Textausschnitt: For this reason you sometimes find two proverbs that seem contradictory: 'Look before you leap' is directly opposed to 'He who hesitates is lost.' Which proverb is appropriate in any given situation depends on acquiring an additional insight into the concrete particular circumstances of the situation.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Bedeutung, symbolische; Lächeln

Kurzinhalt: symbolische Bedeutung am Beispiel des Lächelns; Funktion des Symbols auf der "intersubjektiven" Ebene

Textausschnitt: The person you smile at grasps the meaning spontaneously and responds with a similar expression, thereby creating a temporary bond. Further, a smile is not an expression of your mind as found in Euclid's Elements. It is an expression of one person to another; it is expressive of the whole person - body and soul. Finally, the smile is not a verbal expression, it is preverbal. You learn to smile long before you learn to speak ....
Before you come to know your own personal identity, you feel a spontaneous identity with whatever and whomever enters into your field of awareness ....
... Here I wish to draw attention to symbols as our most spontaneous and primordial pattern of meaning which operates on all levels of being from unconscious, vital processes to higher realms of conscious knowing and choosing. Most importantly, symbols operate through images that evoke the feelings that supply the motivation for carrying out decisions.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Drama, Rolle, Handlung

Kurzinhalt: Definition von Drama; zweifache Spannungen in einem Drama; Begriffe "role" und "plot"

Textausschnitt: A drama, therefore, can be defined as the dialectical unfolding of a plot among the characters as they motivate themselves and one another toward a final destiny of success or failure. Such a destiny seems to flow from their decisions and actions and, at the same time, seems to transcend their intentions.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Antigone, Kreon; Dialektik

Kurzinhalt: 4-fache Dialektik; Forderung nach einer transkulturellen Begründung von Normen; Kreon, Newton

Textausschnitt: This means that we have identified three different dialectics: the tension of the person within himself or herself; the tension of persons within the group; and the tension between one community and another. However, there is a fourth and even more significant dialectic - the human historical drama - the tensions between any one historical community its predecessors and successors. ...

To answer this question, cultural authorities need a transcultural norm that is not dependent on any cultural context, but that grounds and orders each and every cultural context. Creon's case could be compared to Newton's when he thought he was thinking and measuring in a completely universal framework but was, in fact, operating in a quite limited framework. However, the limits of that framework were hidden from him.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Dialektik, 4-fache dialektische Spannung

Kurzinhalt: 1) zw. Ego und Selbst, 2) zw. Individuum und Gruppe, 3) zw. Gruppen, 4) zw. Gruppen und ihrer Vergangenheit und Zukunft; Geschichte als Grundlage

Textausschnitt: Thus, the social dialectic tends to condition the way personal dialectics unfold. But the basic dialectic is a historical one since it sets the directions and conditions the way the other three operate. This also means that, while every human person is a social being, even more basically, we are 'historical beings.'

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Gefühle, Sexualität

Kurzinhalt: Entfaltung der Gefühle auf verschiedenen Stufen; Notwendigkeit, die vielfältigen Spannungen in Einklang zu bringen

Textausschnitt: For example, sexual tensions emerge from the unconscious organic level and rise to the conscious psychic, intellectual, or symbolic level when we wonder and ask: What is the meaning of these feelings that are orienting me toward sexual satisfaction on the psychic level and, at the same time, orienting me toward unknown meanings on the intellectual and/or symbolic levels? Such feelings direct us, but their objective is realized on different levels. To harmonize these multiple tensions, not once but throughout a lifetime of changing desires and fears, sets the human problem.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Verweigerung von Einsicht, dramatische Befangenheit (dramatic bias); Furcht, Angst; Zensor

Kurzinhalt: Furcht und Angst als Auslöser für eine Verweigerung von Einsicht; Fähigkeit, Gefühle durch Bilder (Imaginationen) zu lenken; Arbeitsweise des Zensores

Textausschnitt: Besides the desire to know manifesting itself in attentive questioning, there are the fears that may block or divert this questioning. ...
How does such censoring operate? The explanation is to be found in your ability to control or direct or evoke feelings through images. Questioning deals primarily with images, and images are associated with feelings, memories, and expectations. ...
How you interpret such feelings depends to a large extent on the way you question them.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Zensurfunktion; Freud, Ödipus

Kurzinhalt: Zensurfunktion (Zensor) bei Freud, Definition

Textausschnitt: Freud's 'censor' can be described as how you avoid getting insights about yourself that would reveal you to yourself in ways you fear, disapprove or even detest. Thus in Freud's classic Oedipus case ...

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Streben, selbstloses; Mühsal; allgemeine Befangenheit (general bias)s Vorurteil

Kurzinhalt: Schwierigkeit, sich einen Habitus des uneingeschränkten Strebens anzueignen

Textausschnitt: In your own particular history, it takes considerable training and purging of other desires before you begin to feel comfortable in a purely intellectual pattern of knowing. Even after you have acquired a taste for purely intellectual issues, you are still a long way from making such a disinterested desire to know the central orienting desire of your living. The reason is, of course, that purely intellectual patterns emerge in a person who already has a different orienting set of personal and collective habits. So in the Hellenic culture the rise of theoretical patterns took place in communities already oriented by their symbolic and practical patterns of knowing.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: general bias als Spannung zw. desinterested und interested desire

Kurzinhalt: general bias (allgemeines Vorurteil) als Spannung zw. common sense und theoretischenm Erfahrungsmuster; Spannung zw. Uneigennützem und eigennützem Streben

Textausschnitt: () it would seem that theoretical and common-sense patterns of knowing should complement one another. The dialectical tension between your interested and disinterested desire to know should bring about long-term progress. The dialectical tensions that stem from oppositions, however, all too easily turn into contradictions and gradually generate biases that steadily lead to decline and from decline to disorder and eventual breakdown. ()

The source of the problem of general bias is the tension between interested and disinterested knowing. The solution is not to disparage either pattern of knowing but to legitimate both patterns, and to understand precisely how they may actually complement one another. Put in its broadest context, common-sense knowers have to become long-term historical knowers if they are to understand how and why their own social order is operating the way it is. Common-sense knowers are not historical knowers; they are concerned with short-term problems, while historical knowers are trying to understand how a long series of past common-sense knowers and their respective communities have made history and handed it on in its present form.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Niedergang (decline): langer Zyklus 1; Dialektik: progressiv - konservativ; Gruppenbefangenheit (group bias) -> allgemeine Befangenheit (general bias) -> verengter Horizont; Allgemeinverstand (im Rahmen sozialer Unordnung) - reines Streben nach Wissen

Kurzinhalt: If this scenario is repeated over several centuries, the results will bring to light how the general bias interacts with group bias to generate a long cycle of decline, which leads to a series of lower viewpoints or constricting social and cultural ...

Textausschnitt: 5. Long Cycle of Decline

60/3 It is important to distinguish in any social situation those disorders that arise from particular groups in society and those that result from the general neglect by all communities. There is a significant difference between short-term disorders that result from class or group biases and the long-term disorders that stem from the general bias.1 This distinction between short-term and long-term cycles of disorders needs some clarification. We are all familiar with ideas about progress and growth, but explanations of decline and contracting horizons are less familiar. (86; Fs; tblStw: xy)

61/3 Let us consider first the problem of correcting class conflicts. In the examples of iceboxes and refrigerators or horse carriages and automobiles, we find advances in technology which result in, among other things, material comfort. Such advances, though they may go against the vested interests of certain economic groups, are very difficult to block, even in the short run. However, if we examine attempted reforms or improvements in religious, political, and other social groups, we find it is much more difficult to correct group biases. What usually happens is that the social order divides into a reform group and a reactionary group. The reform group may turn rebellious and break away, or it may become revolutionary and end up using force to accomplish its goals. Unfortunately, this course of events has two negative results. The reform group becomes the new dominant group and will develop symbolic stories, rituals, slogans, and songs to celebrate and justify its own wisdom and righteousness while denouncing the follies and injustices of the vanquished. The defeated group, on the other hand, has its own hatreds and resentful memories which it will hand on to future generations to motivate and promote revenge whenever opportunities for retribution emerge. In this scenario a group bias is overcome, but in such a way that two new group biases have been generated in correcting the older bias. (86; Fs)

62/3 If this scenario is repeated over several centuries, the results will bring to light how the general bias interacts with group bias to generate a long cycle of decline, which leads to a series of lower viewpoints or constricting social and cultural horizons. To grasp the results of this long cycle of decline, let us recall that the basic dialectic is between the interested, practical knowing of common sense and the disinterested desire of theoretical knowing. While there is a tension and opposition between these two concrete conscious poles, there could be harmonious complementarity. But for such complementarity to emerge, people who are working out day- to-day solutions to the problems of practical living must realize that common sense is a specialized pattern of knowing that is limited to particular problems and particular solutions. It cannot deal adequately with problems inherited from past generations that are blocking questions, insights, and ideas that could become operative if these inherited biases and disorienting cultural assumptions were recognized and removed. (86f; Fs)

63/3 In other words, common-sense knowers must realize and acknowledge their own limitations and agree to cooperate with knowers whose insights and ideas have their source, not in short-term objectives and practices, but in long-term concerns and consequences. To people of common sense, this sounds like more foolishness; even worse, to some it may sound like the blind leading the blind. Such long-term interpretations and evaluations seem like mere idealism and folly because general bias has been so effective in establishing the attitudes and opinions that make these interpretations seem like wishful thinking. (87; Fs)

64/3 Just as common-sense insights accumulate to form a solid core of intelligent working assumptions that lead to progress, just as simple excuses and rationalizations accumulate and become permanent disorders in the social order, so too a historical series of social disorders can set up a longer cycle that form tensions between the hard-boiled pragmatists and the abstract, impractical theoreticians. (87; Fs)

65/3 The hard-boiled pragmatists have to work out their day-to-day problems in a social order that is the result, not only of past intelligent policies, but also of various forms of institutionalized disorders. What works in such historical situations are not coherent and reasonable courses of action because the policies are not dealing with reasonable and coherent situations. What will work is some form of compromise that does not challenge the actual source of the disorders, but effects a plausible adaptation to these present disorders. This means that the cycles of daily living can keep moving in some combination of reasonable and unreasonable practices. The result is that the common-sense desire to know will itself become distorted. But what is much more serious is that the same sort of distortion can spread to the theoretical sphere. (87; Fs)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Niedergang (decline): langer Zyklus 2; Anpassung des uneigennützen Strebens an die Verdrehung des common sense; Machiavelli; Fakten sozialer Unordnung als Grundlage für Humanwissenschaften; Notwendigkeit eines höheren Gesichtspunkts

Kurzinhalt: ... instead of the disinterested desire providing norms for judging the situations, the reverse occurs, as the facts of the socially disordered situations become the basis and provide the norms for an empirical science of human behavior. Thus ...

Textausschnitt: 66/3 Theoreticians grow up in the same concrete social order and disorders as practical knowers, and so theory can be subject to similar pressures and disorientations which may gradually compromise the different long-term objectives and disinterested desires that initiate and sustain their passion for learning. Gradually the goal of disinterested knowing is no longer an open-ended inquiry and critical reflection, but some truncated version of it which, in the limit, surrenders its own norms and objectives. In such a limit case, instead of the disinterested desire providing norms for judging the situations, the reverse occurs, as the facts of the socially disordered situations become the basis and provide the norms for an empirical science of human behavior. Thus the dramatic warning by Machiavelli: (87; Fs; tblStw: xy)

67/3 For imagination has created many principalities and republics that have never been seen or known to have any real existence, for how we live is so different from how we ought to live that he who studies what ought to be done rather than what is done will learn the way to his downfall rather than to his preservation. A man striving in every way to be good will meet his ruin among the great number who are not good. Hence it is necessary for a prince, if he wishes to remain in power, to learn how not to be good and to use his knowledge or refrain from using it as he may need.1

68/3 Norms for questioning and understanding, therefore, are to be subordinated to the concrete disordered performances of different communities. The general bias, which has its origin in the dialectic between the interested and disinterested desire to know, eventually inhibits the progress toward more highly intelligent policies and courses of action in the short term, but also in the long run, it tends to distort the unfolding of the disinterested desire to know. What is needed to reverse this general bias is a new and higher viewpoint that will attack the problem at its source. What is needed is a method that can interpret the historical sequence of cultures in a critically normative way. The purpose of such a critique would be, not just to understand human history, but to understand it in a way that human communities can become more responsible for the history they have inherited and for the history they are making and transmitting to further generations. (88; Fs)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Niedergang (decline): langer Zyklus 3; 5 Schritte zur Bewältigung des langfristigen Niedergangs; Prämisse: Intelligibilität des Universums; Einstein

Kurzinhalt: The fundamental premise for setting forth such a world-order is that our universe is intelligible or understandable. As Einstein put it.

Textausschnitt: 69/3 It is too early in our study to examine how such new ways of becoming responsible are to be developed, but we may sketch several important steps that have to be taken. First, a critical study of history begins with an understanding of the notion of a dialectic as a correlation of concretely opposed activities that modify one another as they unfold. Second, these concretely opposed patterns of understanding may operate positively or negatively, thereby generating the cumulative results we know as progress or decline. Third, there are four different dialectics operating in any individual, but the basic dialectic is between the interested and disinterested desire to know. Fourth, the disinterested desire to know is preoccupied with long-term cumulative results while the interested desire to know attends to short-term problems of daily living and their solutions. There is a fundamental distinction to be made, therefore, between short-term and long-term progress and decline. Fifth, in order to overcome long-term decline it is critical that a distinction be made between group bias, and general bias since the short-term interests of common-sense knowers can recognize social disorders that arise from the various forms of group biases such as class conflicts, vested interests, and dominant minorities. (88; Fs; tblStw: xy) (notabene)

70/3 The much more serious problem is that the usual common-sense strategy for eliminating operative group biases is through the use of force and violence. This, in turn, sets the conditions for two new group biases, and if this sequence is repeated the much longer cycle of decline sets in, bringing with it various degrees of despair about appealing to a people's desire to know, since such appeals sound like pious platitudes or Utopian proposals. (88f; Fs)

71/3 Finally, it is critically important to grasp that, just as in the dialectic with yourself, you set up screening memories for censoring past events that you refuse to deal with, so too cultural communities construct stories, songs, rituals, and other means of symbolic expressions to screen out their own histories of past communal deeds which they refuse to acknowledge. Later chapters will spell out in more detail how such a critical history can be developed. The first step in this direction will be to explain the present ordering of our universe based on the method of knowing we have considered. The fundamental premise for setting forth such a world-order is that our universe is intelligible or understandable. As Einstein put it. 'The most incomprehensible thing about our universe is that it is comprehensible.' But, as we already have discovered, there are different types of intelligibilities: classical and statistical intelligibilities, common sense and symbolic intelligibilities. To understand our universe we must be able to integrate the different ways in which we understand. This, in turn, means that we must be able to integrate the different methods that guide our knowing activities toward these different forms of intelligibilities. It is to such an integration that we shall turn in the next chapter. (89; Fs)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: common sense; Vernachlässigung

Kurzinhalt: 3 Gründe für das Nicht-Beachten (Übersehen) des common sense Musters

Textausschnitt: 6. Summary
72/3 Although the first three chapters invite you, the reader, to appropriate your own activity of understanding, there is a significant difference between the first two chapters and this third chapter. The examples of insight presented in the first two chapters were taken from theoretical patterns of knowing which are oriented by a disinterested and detached desire to know universal objectives, while the acts of understanding examined in this chapter are oriented by an interested desire to know limited, pragmatic objectives. While these pragmatic objectives are symbolically motivated, in this chapter our concern is, not primarily with personal motives for seeking such goals, but with the broader interests that orient this pattern of knowing, and the fact that these motives direct a person's understanding toward concrete particular courses of action requiring specific skills to achieve particular tasks. (89; Fs)
73/3 Economists or social scientists are interested in more universal courses of human actions, whereas people using common-sense patterns of knowing operate in much narrower and more specialized modes of knowing since their concern is to know how to perform concrete particular tasks. If you are interested in getting along with your neighbor, you are interested not in neighbors generally, but in neighbors who live in a particular place and time, who have particular temperaments, traits, and characters. General advice is helpful, but to be concretely helpful that general knowledge will have to be particularized through insights into concrete situations. And if you move to a different neighborhood, the concrete differences of that new situation will have to be understood in their particularity. To know how to live intelligently in any concrete social situation, you must operate in the common-sense pattern of knowing. You may bring more universal knowledge to bear on that situation, but such general knowledge must be particularized through common-sense insights into the concrete, here-and-now human situations. (89f; Fs)
74/3 If the continually shifting common-sense patterns of knowing are so central to the history of concrete human living, why has this pattern of knowing been so neglected by scholars? There are three reasons. (90; Fs)
75/3 First, it was the dramatic success of theoretical, explanatory knowing in the seventeenth century that precipitated the epistemological crisis and turned philosophers' attention to the problem of the objectivity of knowing. As we have seen, the key step in that revolution was the shift from knowing things in a descriptive context to knowing things in an explanatory pattern where things are no longer related to the knowing subject, but are related to one another in recurring patterns. There was a tendency then among scholars to denigrate any method of knowing that did not operate in the explanatory context. Thus, descriptive knowing that relates things to the subject was criticized and invalidated as subjective and limited to surface appearances, as opposed to the theoretical pattern of knowing that disclosed the real inner structures of things. (90; Fs)
76/3 This mistake was followed by the second oversight of failing to recognize that while theoretical knowing, as practiced by classical scientists such as Galileo and Newton, was valid, it was nevertheless an abstract and universal pattern of knowing. Although the universal laws of mechanics were thought to be verified in concrete instances, they were not verified in every past, present, and future concrete instance. The basic error was to assume that all past and future concrete instances were given and would be given in the same continuous fashion that classical scientists had assumed but had not actually verified. Or, to put it negatively, classical scientists did not assume that the present planetary cycles were operating in a field of statistically given conditions. Unlike contemporary meteorologists, who assume that weather cycles operate under statistically given conditions, classical scientists assumed that the present given conditions would continue to remain the same. (90; Fs)
77/3 Common-sense knowers, on the other hand, realize that situations and people change, and they do so, if not all the time, then at least some of the time. And occasionally these changes can be quite significant and surprising. Common-sense knowledge, then, is always incomplete and can only be completed by paying attention to the concrete tasks and particular people with whom you are working at any given time. To scientists who are attempting to understand the universe in a completely comprehensive way, the common-sense mode of understanding may seem to be rather superficial knowledge, but it is the mode of knowledge that scientists themselves use in dealing with the practical affairs of their own day-to-day living. Moreover, there is no other way of knowing the concrete, particular aspects of things. (90f; Fs)
78/3 A further reason why common-sense modes of knowing have been overlooked or degraded is because knowing concrete particular persons, places, and times is assumed to require no more than ordinary attentive sensing. To know that water, steam, and ice are different modes of behavior of one and the same operating substance (H2O) requires 'looking' underneath the surface of things in order to reveal their hidden structures, whereas common-sense knowers observe only the outward sensible appearances of things and know only the shadows and surfaces of these things. To know the real substance of things we must put on the geometer's or the chemist's glasses and 'see' the inner constituents of these things. Behind this type of assertion is a basic epistemological assumption about what constitutes real objective knowing. I will address this epistemological issue in the fifth chapter, but here I would like to stress the crucial role that insights or understandings play in any pattern of knowing, and especially in the ordinary, familiar, but unthematized mode of common-sense knowing. (91; Fs)
79/3 Let us take as an example the problem of knowing how to read. Before children learn how to read they can see the written or printed letters but cannot see words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. Children have an immediate sensible awareness of the letters, but it will take them a year or more to mediate and transform those immediate sensible experiences into readable experiences of different types of meaning. We cannot see meanings. Children must learn to read the invisible meanings within the visible marks. People who know how to read are so used to interpreting letters as words and phrases that they forget that such words and phrases cannot be seen. Words, then, are not immediate experiences but mediated, interpreted experiences, and without such mediating insights, the visible marks will have no meaning. (91; Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: common sense; konkret, Galileo

Kurzinhalt: 2 Bedeutungen von "konkret"; Bedeutung am Beispiel des Lesens

Textausschnitt: Before children learn how to read they can see the written or printed letters but cannot see words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs.

()What Galileo did not realize was that there were two quite different meanings of the term 'concrete.' First, the term refers to the immediate, actual, and particular aspects of things that come to be interpreted and mediated through common-sense modes of knowing. Second, the meaning of 'concrete' refers not only to the actual and particular things as particular, but to everything about these particular actual things. In other words, the 'concrete' is both particular and comprehensive.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Befangenheit; Zusammenfassung

Kurzinhalt: dramatic bias; group bias; general bias; Zusammenspiel zw. Bildern, Gefühlen und Einsicht

Textausschnitt: () because images orient our feelings, and because knowing depends on the desire to know that emerges in wondering and questioning, we may prevent unwanted discoveries about our psychic selves by redirecting those feelings; we reorient such feeling because they would evoke questions that would condition the probable insights which, in turn, would lead to the disclosure of a personal identity that we are anxious to keep underground and unappropriated.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: common sense; Sokrates

Kurzinhalt: Allwissenheit des common sense; Anwendung von Gewalt am Beispiel Sokrates'

Textausschnitt: And the Athenians' way of removing this Socratic threat to their culturally assumed wisdom was to deal with Socrates in the way they dealt with their other enemies - by the use of force. In other words, the conventional way to solve such problems was, not to take Socrates' questions seriously, but to silence these disturbing questions and then justify the injustice through some form of symbolic cover-up.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: kumulative Unordnung; Sozialwissenschaft

Kurzinhalt: Gruppenbefangenheit, Grundproblem der Geschichte; Machiavelli; Norm der Sozialwissenschaft

Textausschnitt: () ... there is an even more serious consequence that can emerge when social scientists attempt to interpret and evaluate just what is going forward through a historical sequence of such social orders. If social scientists take the actual data of the social situation as the norm for critically judging the reality of the situation, they are abandoning the normative guide that is intrinsic to their own desire to know. In place of this normative desire to know, social scientists substitute the concrete data of the social order, but such data combine ordered and disordered elements without providing any norm by which scientists can discern the difference between a social order and social disorders. Thus, we have the situations that I illustrated by the quotation from The Prince, where Machiavelli rejects any normative standard for governing a people other than the use of force and fraud.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: statistisch, klassisch; Struktur, Gesetz; Gallileo, Aristoteles, Kant

Kurzinhalt: Unterschied zw. klassischer und statistischer Notion

Textausschnitt: () A classical norm was assumed to be a universal necessary standard for judging all cases without exception; Galileo did not anticipate discovering exceptions to the law of falling bodies. Statistical laws do anticipate such exceptions to ideal frequencies within a certain range, and so a statistical standard is not a universal necessary standard.

() Yet both the classical notion of science and classical laws and the statistical notion of science and statistical laws are based on questioning experiences, understanding those experiences, formulating an understanding of those experiences, and then verifying the formulations of this understanding of questioned experiences. The difference between these two notions of science and their respective heuristic procedures is that they ask different types of questions

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: statistisch, klassisch; Komplementarität

Kurzinhalt: statistische und klassische Form: verschiedene Arten von Intelligibilitäten; beide Methoden abstrahieren; klassisch: Voraussage, was notwendig geschehen wird; statistisch: Norm, was sein dürfte; Infragestellung der Notwendigkeit des Gesetztes

Textausschnitt: () Classical laws deal with different kinds of functions and statistical laws deal with their frequencies, thus complementing one another since classical laws deal with functions and statistical laws deal with the ideal frequencies with which those functions behave. Both laws are 'forms,' if by 'form' we mean an intelligibility. But I they are quite different and distinguishable types of intelligibilities or I 'forms.'

() ... Statistical scientists intend to explain what probably will happen next year or in ten years by generalizing from what has happened during the last ten or twenty years. Such scientific procedures produced a revolution in scientific thinking; scientific laws were considered to be, not norms for what might happen, but a prediction about what necessarily will happen. What classical scientists failed to realize was that, in formulating their laws, they had abstracted from certain aspects of concrete observable experiences that provided the field for statistical inquiry.

() ... Gradually, as statistical science advanced in the twentieth century, the notion of necessity as an intrinsic property of a law has faded, and in its place the complementarity of these two methods has emerged. To study this complementarity in still more detail, we will consider the technical notion of a scheme of recurrence.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Schemes of Recurrence; Definition: Wahrscheinlichkeit (probability); Beispiel: Kartenspiel

Kurzinhalt: Probability, therefore, may be defined as the intelligibility of chance. Or probability is an intelligible correlation of possibilities ordered by expected, idealized frequencies.

Textausschnitt: 23/4 The most significant property of this notion of a cycle is that the temporal sequence of events ends in such a way as to initiate the new cycle. For example, middle C on the piano ends a diatonic scale of do, re, mi, so, fa, la, ti, do and, at the same time, initiates the next diatonic series; do is both the last and the first note. Thus, a linear series of musical tones may also be understood as a cyclical series. The same diatonic scale may be expanded into a chromatic scale and then into the much more complex harmonic circle of fifths. Within such cyclical contexts, endless variations of melodic and harmonic sequences can be constructed. However, there is a hidden assumption in such cyclical order, namely, that the conditions for the repeating cycle will be provided continuously, whereas the opposite assumption is at the basis of statistical laws. Since statistical laws are also intelligible forms, there is no a priori reason for excluding the possibility that the actual order of the universe may be based on the assumptions of statistical thinking, as well as on classical thinking. (101; Fs)

24/4 We may ask whether we can combine the traditional notion of continuous cyclical processes with the contemporary scientific notion of statistical regularities which assumes discontinuities. Not only are the two compatible, but together they provide scientists with a much more flexible notion of design or world-order and, as we shall see, such a design opens up the possibility for dynamic evolutionary developments. (101; Fs)

25/4 Let us take as an example the game of poker. The game begins by shuffling the pack of cards in order to break up any prior sequence and to create a random mixture of fifty-two cards. The challenge for the players is to play their cards in the wisest way possible. After each hand is played the cycle is repeated, starting again with a random mixture of the cards. On the assumption that each player receives five out of a possible fifty-two cards, statistical scientists have worked out the possible combinations that can be constructed out of the five cards which the players receive and the probabilities of these combinations occurring. An informed player has some understanding of these odds, namely, certain combinations of cards will occur and recur more or less frequently. In the long run, the person who plays according to these ideal probabilities will be able to set up a repeating cycle of winning. Here we have an example of a cycle of recurring events that takes place in a random assortment of cards. (101; Fs)

26/4 Most significantly, this cycle does not begin and end on the assumption of continuous conditions being provided. The conditions for the winning scheme are discontinuous and involve a wide flexibility of strategic decisions according to the random or discontinuous reception of various possible combinations that each player receives. The cycle can begin with any given set of five cards, but the wise player operating under those conditions will still win in the long run. Moreover, the longer the game goes on the more evident will be the winning cycle of the best players. When understood in this way, the game of chance is not a game of chance at all, but a game in which possible, probable, and actual schemes of events keep recurring. In each hand that is dealt, there are five actual cards out of a possible fifty-two. A player will keep certain combinations of the five and discard the others according to a strategy of probabilities of receiving certain final combinations that will actually be played. To speak of poker as a game of chance explains nothing. But to specify the game in terms of probability is to 'explain' the game. Probability, therefore, may be defined as the intelligibility of chance. Or probability is an intelligible correlation of possibilities ordered by expected, idealized frequencies. (101f; Fs)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Recurrence; Evolution, Darwin, Galapagos

Kurzinhalt: Schemes of Recurrence; Evolution als Beispiel für eine rekursives biologisches Schema

Textausschnitt: The wise card-player deals with different combinations in different ways, so plants deal with different chemical conditions in different ways. Any given plant is just one of an endless range of possible solutions to the problem of emergence and survival within a physical and chemical environment. Implied in this argument is the notion of a higher viewpoint or two-level thinking.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Recurrence; Arithmetik, Algebra, Pflanzen, Tiere

Kurzinhalt: Kombination des rekursiven Schemas mit dem höheren Standpunkt am Beispiel von Arithmetik und Algebra usw.

Textausschnitt: The combination of the notion of a scheme of recurrence, which is itself an integration of classical and statistical procedures, can be combined with the notion of a higher viewpoint to provide us with a third heuristic structure - genetic heuristic structure.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Entwicklung; Deduktion; genetisch, klassisch, statistisch

Kurzinhalt: Genetic Heuristic Structures; Entwicklung als das Auftauchen einer höheren Stufe einer Integration; genetische Methode in Bezug auf die klassische und statistische

Textausschnitt: () Development, then, is an emergence of a new and higher integration that will include the prior integration but, more importantly, will provide you with a more complete and differentiated understanding than existed on the prior lower level.

() Just as classical method involves a notion of law in terms of functions, just as statistical method evolves a different type of law of frequencies, so genetic method evolves into a quite different type of law or normative intelligibility. A genetic law or a law of development is a law about changing systematic relations.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Genetisch; Eiche; Regelmäßigkeit

Kurzinhalt: klassische, statistische, genetische Regelmäßigkeit; Antizipationen der jeweiligen Methode

Textausschnitt: () ... example of a tree. The oak tree evolves from a small acorn, and so we say that the acorn develops into an oak tree. But does the tree develop according to a law? We certainly speak of regularity in biological growth, but we also speak of the regularity in the planetary cycle. There are, then, two meanings of regularity: classical regularity and genetic or developmental regularity.

() Classical method anticipates discovering laws that can be combined into various abstract schemes or patterns. Statistical method characterizes how often such abstract, possible schemes may emerge and survive, and statistical thinkers also anticipate that there will be nonsystematic occurrences diverging from these systematic occurrences. Genetic method anticipates that there will be a sequence of such systems that can be correlated developmentally.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: dialektische heuristische Struktur

Kurzinhalt: inverse Einsicht; es gibt keine Intelligibilität in den Stufen des Niedergangs; Neuorientierung nur durch Umkehr

Textausschnitt: () Dialectical method, then, anticipates discovering, not light and reason, but darkness and unreasonableness. The dialectician realizes that the only way to correct such radical disorientations and distortions is to attempt to reorient the way people wonder through a basic reversal of the desires and fears that govern their knowings and doings.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Weltordnung; a priori, a posteriori; höherer Gesichtspunkt; allgemeine heuristische Struktur; Universum

Kurzinhalt: formales Schema einer Weltordnung; rekursives Schema; eine allgemeine heuristische Struktur - Integration aller heuristischer Schemen - öffnet das Verständnis für die Entfaltung des Universums

Textausschnitt: () ... the philosopher can anticipate that such schemes can be arranged into a world-order without determining what the specific schemes of this order will be. The contents have to be determined a posteriori.

() By combining classical, statistical, and genetic procedures for anticipating insights, you may set up a general heuristic structure that anticipates understanding the dynamic unfolding of the entire universe. The key notion for ordering this universe, then, is a 'conditioned series of schemes.'

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Weltordnung; Ausgangslage

Kurzinhalt: Weltordnung als bedingte Serie rekursiver Schemen; Wichtigkeit der Anzahl ursprünglicher Wahrscheinlichkeiten; System rekursiver Schemen - Determinismus

Textausschnitt: Thus, we see how later schemes in the series are conditioned by the earlier schemes, so that later schemes cannot emerge until earlier schemes have already emerged ...

() ... the basic design or ordering of our universe is a conditioned series of schemes that have emerged, are emerging, and will continue to emerge in accord with changing schedules of probabilities.

() If the events in our universe are not necessary, but only probable, then, the total number of possible initial events becomes critically important in order to ensure that later schemes of events will emerge. The later a scheme occurs in a series, the less probable will be its occurrence ...

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Weltordnung; intelligibel, nicht notwendig

Kurzinhalt: Universum: intelligibel, dennoch nicht notwendig; eine bedingte Serie rekursiver Schemen

Textausschnitt: () It does not pretend to tell scientists what the contents of their various sciences will reveal. But it does insist that this universe is intelligible but not necessary; that there are different forms of intelligibilities; that these different forms of intelligibilities can be combined into a conditioned series of recurring schemes

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Weltordnung; Aristoteles, Galileo; Determinismus, Uhr

Kurzinhalt: Aristoteles: Schnittstelle zw. Notwendigkeit und kontingentem: Himmelsbewegungen - irdische Bewegungen; Naturgesetz; Notwendigkeit auf der Erde, Möglichkeit für Wahrscheinlichkeit

Textausschnitt: In Aristotle's world-order, the fundamental contrast was between the necessary celestial movements of the sun, moon, and stars and the 'accidental' movements of terrestrial things. Further, Aristotle's notion of science as 'a search for certain knowledge of necessary causes' prevented him from developing a science of the contingent ...

() Once classical laws were first discovered by Galileo and their abstract nature was understood, the possibility of statistical laws and schemes of recurrence became possible and a new world-order, in terms of a conditioned series of schemes unfolding according to changing probabilities of emergence and survival could be constructed.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Ding, Notion

Kurzinhalt: Erfassung des Dinges in beschreibender und erklärender Weise

Textausschnitt: () To understand the thing, we have to shift from both the limited and specialized viewpoint of common sense and the remarkably different, abstract and limited perspective of science and consider things both in their descriptive and in their explanatory aspects, which means that we must consider them comprehensively and concretely. The term 'concrete' refers, not only to the particular and actual aspects of things, but also to their general and comprehensive characteristics. To know a thing concretely is to know that thing both comprehensively and singularly

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Ding; Unterscheidung: biologisch, common-sense ...

Kurzinhalt: Der Körper ist kein Ding; Erfahrung des Dinges entsprechend der verschiedenen Erfahrungsmuster; Verständnis des Dinges erst durch die "Zusammenschau" aller Weisen der Erfahrung und Erkennens

Textausschnitt: () ... to distinguish between things as biologically experienced and things as known in the other patterns of experience in which we operate

() 'Real' bodies in the biological patterning of experience are ones that are out there, right now. Such things are sensed, directly and immediately. But sensing is not knowing; it is only a first step to knowing. Without insights that mediate and transcend the sensibly known unities, we cannot know the concrete, intelligible unities we mean by the term 'thing.'

() ... the common-sense pattern of knowing does involve insights through which things are made intelligible but only in a limited form of knowing, since in this pattern knowers are not especially interested in grasping the what and the why of things. They are interested instead in naming things and relating them to one another in terms of their sensible likenesses and differences.

() ... to know the thing completely we must understand all the different ways that things can be known and be able to integrate these different patterns. To do this effectively requires nothing less than a metaphysical understanding of the complete being and behaving of things.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Eddington, 2 Tische; Baum

Kurzinhalt: Beispiel: Sonnen-, Erdzentriertheit; Baum als Objekt des common-sense, des klassischen, statistischen und genetischen Biologen; Umkehr in der Biologie

Textausschnitt: () ... the ordinary common-sense table and the explanatory table of contemporary science. There are not two tables, but one. Just as the solar-centered world of Copernicus and the geocentered world of common sense are not two worlds ...

() ... present biological studies have begun to reverse the way biologists originally began to study trees. Earlier studies began from the external descriptive properties and raised questions about internal activities; contemporary scientists begin from biochemical and biophysical studies that are able in limited ways to explain why the external properties of biological things are the way they are.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Ding, "konkret"; Definition

Kurzinhalt: "konkret": partikulär u. umfassend; einzeln und allgemein; eines und vieles; Akzidentien; traditionelle Terminologie, Schwierigkeit; Wesen als heuristische Struktur; Madame Bovary - Baum

Textausschnitt: () ... defining a thing as a concrete, individual existing unity considered in the totality of its parts or predicates. The 'concrete' is particular and comprehensive; it is singular and universal. And the reason why the concrete is particular and general is because that is the way things are; any concrete, existing thing is 'one and many,' one in itself and many in its correlations with other things.

() For example, it is a mistake to think that we know the essences of trees; the essence is what we anticipate knowing when we know all that there is to be known about trees. Heuristic definitions and heuristic methods of science avoid this mistake. Translating this language into explanatory terms, we may say that trees exist in and through their present organic schemes of recurrence. These recurring schemes (parts) do not exist; they occur and recur according to a schedule of probabilities of emergence and survival. Things are the concrete, dynamic identities that perdure or subsist in these recurring schemes of changes.

() ... Madame Bovary -> 75/4 -77/4

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Ding; Erfahrung, Tier

Kurzinhalt: Die Erfahrungsweise der Tiere; Extrovertiertheit

Textausschnitt: () In other words, animals experience the world about them within their own conscious, spatiotemporal frames which are oriented according to their changing biological needs. Just as questions orient human knowers toward a field of intelligibly unknown objects, so too biological drives orient sensing animals toward a field of biologically satisfying objects. Animals are basically extroverts.

() Animals do not have epistemological problems. They have a very successful 'sense' of reality, but they do not have an understanding of reality. Therefore, they do not mediate their immediate field of objects through questions and answers that cause human knowers to wonder if they have or have not correctly mediated the intelligibility of the sensible world.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Urteil; das bewusste Unbekannte 2. Grades

Kurzinhalt: Ist das so?; Wissen als Einheit dreier Prozesse; Gerichtsurteil als Metapher

Textausschnitt: () You may think you have a brilliant idea, but spontaneously you find yourself wondering, Is it so? Once this critical wondering begins, then your idea is transformed into a conditional idea that may or may not be true. Second the question, Is it so?, is a normative orienting that directs you toward a judgment that you have not yet judged.

() Thus your desire to question spontaneously takes you, first, beyond sensible experiences into the field of intelligible experiences and, second, beyond possibly intelligible experiences into the field of actually intelligible experiences.

() Knowing is not a simple activity. It is an activity composed of three different levels of activities ... The first level of outer or inner sensible experiences is, not knowing, but only a part of knowing. Similarly, the second level of understanding is, not knowing, but only a part. Only third-level judging completes the process of knowing, embracing all three levels, uniting them into the single structured activity that we name 'knowing.'

() Among the metaphors for making good judgments, the one of 'weighing the evidence' seems especially helpful in clarifying what causes judging.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Urteil; Freiheit, Kontrolle, "dritte" Stufe

Kurzinhalt: Your ability to control your activities, therefore, increases as you move from the first level of experiencing to the second level of questioning, understanding, ...

Textausschnitt: 19/5 In raising a question about your sensible experiences, you set the conditions for the emergence of an insight, but questioning does not guarantee that the insight will occur. Insights are probable events and, while you may make them more or less probable, you cannot completely control their emergence. However, when you move on to the third level and ask the question. Is my insight correct?, your control of the cognitional process changes significantly. You can always judge, even when you do not understand, since you can say, I do not understand, which is itself a judgment. If you do understand, but do not have sufficient evidence to make a certain judgment, you can express this state of your mind and say, I am inclined to think or to doubt, etc. In other words, because you realize that you should not judge when the evidence is insufficient, you feel more responsible for your judging than you do for your understanding. Furthermore, you are more responsible for your second-level insights than for your first-level activities of remembering and hearing. (125; Fs)

20/5 Your ability to control your activities, therefore, increases as you move from the first level of experiencing to the second level of questioning, understanding, and conceiving, and you have an even wider range of control as you move from the second to the third level. As we shall see in the seventh chapter, your control and responsibility reaches an even higher stage as you move on to the fourth level of evaluating and choosing a course of action. The 'I' that experiences is related to, but different from, the 'I' that questions and understands, and the 'I' that reflects and judges is also related to, but different than, the 'I' on the lower levels. Besides these three, there is more obviously one and the same 'I' that unites these three levels of activities into the single, unique identity. It is this unity that we shall consider in the next section. (125; Fs)

21/5 Another way to emphasize the differences in your control over these three cognitional levels is to focus on the way that judging involves a personal commitment to what you judge or assert. People are very sensitive about their judgments because when they judge, for example, that a person is guilty, they are not saying that they merely think this person is guilty; rather, they have moved beyond thinking and taken the final cognitional step in which thinking becomes knowing. They do not think the person is guilty, they know it and assert it. So, if you question their judgment, you are questioning the personal commitment that they have made to the truth and accuracy of their judgment. (125; Fs)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Urteil; privat - öffentlich; absolut und bedingt; Beispiel: Gericht; Urteil als Grundlage der Gemeinschaft; Galileo; das bedingte Absolute

Kurzinhalt: What is common to knowers is not that they have had the same experiences, but that they have asked the same question about their insights and ideas, ... Judging adds to your ideas the affirmation or negation, guilty or not guilty, true or false. However,

Textausschnitt: 22/5 Paradoxically, then, judgments are both very personal and very public. A person is judged to be guilty, not because the juror said so, but because the juror judged that there was sufficient evidence to assert that this person did in fact commit the crime. In this way, judgments are very private and personal, but they are also impersonal and objectively public. The juror is asserting that any other knower who examines the evidence will also find in that evidence a sufficient reason for making the same judgment. This means that if you tell the truth, no matter how personal or private that truth may be, it has a public, shareable dimension that transcends any particular person and permits other knowers to participate in, and to make their own commitment to, this same truth. Thus many knowers can belong to and share in the same true judgments. And, while each judgment is personal and private, still correct judgments are also impersonal and public. There can be one truth that provides the ground for many knowers to commit themselves to belong to that truth. (125f; Fs)

23/5 For example, Galileo's law of falling bodies and Newton's law of universal gravitation were discovered and verified by single knowers but they became the public property of a whole community of knowers. More surprising, Galileo and Newton have passed away but their judgments - insofar as they are correct - have perdured. What is this perduring public dimension of a correct judgment? (126; Fs)

24/5 What perdures is not the conditions under which the judgment was made, but the intelligibility that was apprehended and affirmed. What gets judged when you judge is whether you have understood things correctly. What is common to knowers is not that they have had the same experiences, but that they have asked the same question about their insights and ideas, namely, Are they correct? What every knower shares is the demand that emerges consciously and spontaneously with the question, Is it so? It pervades every conscious knower, setting up a demand for sufficient evidence to ground our prospective judgment. Thus that critical question, Is it so?, motivates thinkers to become judgers. For example, the knower as a judger might say. This is an impressive idea, but is it so? Judging adds to your ideas the affirmation or negation, guilty or not guilty, true or false. However, the yes or no by itself does not make sense. Without the what or why of the second level, there is nothing to judge. Judging, then, borrows from the first two levels the contents for which it finds 'sufficient evidence,' and so asserts, Yes, it is so, or No, it is not so. (126; Fs)

25/5 The simple yes or no may not seem significant, but it is important to notice what the judgment does to the synthesis of the first two levels. No longer is the synthesis a conditional synthesis, since it has been transformed through judging into an unconditional synthesis. The assertion, Yes, it is so, utters an absolute, and when you affirm unconditionally it is because you have grasped that the conditions have been given, as you have understood them to be given. This absolute is absolute only because the conditions are given. In other words, it is not a completely unconditioned absolute; rather, it is an absolute by virtue of its conditions having been given. It is a limited absolute. This discussion has treated the cognitional activity of judging in a general way. I would now like to consider two special forms of judging: common-sense judging and scientific judging. (126f; Fs)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Common sense, Urteil; Rechtfertigung über die Gewissheit; Norm für richtiges Urteil auf der Stufe des common-sense

Kurzinhalt: The problem in making correct common-sense judgments is that these limits are very specialized, which means that the range of such judgments is always circumscribed and limited to a descriptive context of concrete, particular circumstances.

Textausschnitt: 26/5 Common sense is a specialized pattern of knowing that is interested in solving our practical day-to-day problems of living in intelligent and reasonable ways. This pattern of cognitional activities develops to deal with concrete particular issues, which means that it is not prepared to deal with theoretical, comprehensive concerns. While common-sense knowers must learn how to cooperate with members of their family and neighborhood, while they must learn how to cooperate economically, politically, educationally, and religiously with other cooperating groups, common-sense knowers do not abstract from their own subject-centered, descriptive understandings and judgings of things. They do not seek the sort of comprehensive understanding of social, economic, and political structures that we find among human scientific knowers, such as sociologists and economists. But this does not mean that common-sense knowers do not or cannot judge correctly within the limits in which they operate. (127; Fs)

27/5 The problem in making correct common-sense judgments is that these limits are very specialized, which means that the range of such judgments is always circumscribed and limited to a descriptive context of concrete, particular circumstances.1 As an example there are the common-sense schemes that teachers acquire in learning how to communicate the subject matter of their discipline. Pedagogy is a skill or art that has to be learned; teachers observe, listen to advice, experiment and test different approaches, adjusting and correcting until they reach a certain mastery and feel comfortable in dealing with a range of different experiences in pragmatically successful ways. At this point teachers have acquired a context of judgments that permits them to prepare and organize their subject matter and to design effective means of communicating their material to a group of students. The level of mastery attained depends on the ease with which teachers are able to address different pedagogical problems and situations, correctly judging the receptivity of different types of students with respect to different materials. A teacher who has acquired such a set of practical judgments has a cluster of practical insights to which she or he adds, in every new situation or for every new object, the further insights for dealing successfully with this new situation. The teacher keeps generalizing or analogizing by grasping that every new situation can be dealt with as prior situations were judged. This is the way we reason, reflect, and judge in a common-sense pattern of knowing. (127; Fs)

28/5 It is natural for knowers to generalize, to argue from one particular case to successive similar cases. The problem, however, is not merely to analogize or generalize, but to do so accurately. In other words, the practically wise teacher knows how to size up a class and shift gears when he or she grasps that certain modifications in teaching are needed. Failure to make such modifications reveals how easy it is to generalize that the present situation and its problems can be solved in the same way as in prior situations when, in fact, there are differences in the 'givens' of this situation that demand to be attended to, understood, and judged in slightly different ways. As a result, the teacher blunders, and instead of understanding and correctly judging the situation, he or she misunderstands and misjudges. (128; Fs)

29/5 To analyze and generalize from one situation and set of problems to the next, you need to check carefully and make certain that the situations are, in fact, actually similar. If you do make a mistake and misapprehend, then you may correct the mistake the next time by asking, Have I correctly understood this situation?; Have I reviewed and checked out this new situation carefully, allowing sufficient time for questioning to bring to light problematic differences that are sufficiently different from the prior sequence of situations to require new understandings and new procedures in order to achieve successful results? (128; Fs)

30/5 How do you as judger know whether your critical questioning has been given sufficient time to bring to light problematic areas in your present practical situation? The norm for true judgments is sufficient evidence precisely as sufficient, and such evidence is sufficient when your insights meet the issues and problems precisely and correctly. The standard for correct insights, then, is correct questioning. Do your practical insights meet the demands of your critical wondering as it operates within the limits of common-sense interests? Such interests are limited, and so the problem is to establish the limits correctly. Thus in the case of learning a craft, we speak of skilled workers as persons who have learned their trade; they have reached a level of competence and mastery, which means they can judge correctly what the problems and situations are for a wide array of cases. The point is that skilled workers are able to make correct judgments in solving practical problems because they are operating in specialized, limited contexts in which they have already acquired the competence and skill to size up problematic situations correctly and to solve them easily and effectively. The wise worker, like Aristotle's wise person, knows 'the right thing to do, the right time, and the right way to do it.' (128; Fs)

31/5 It is important to insist that such judgments are correct or true only within very limited contexts. They are limited to particular times and places, particular problems, and particular solutions. Quite a different type of judgment is needed if you wish to understand and judge correctly how the entire physical universe actually operates. (128f; Fs)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Urteil; Unterschied: common-sense - Wissenschaft; Galileo; Newton

Kurzinhalt: Classical scientists like Galileo, Newton, and Einstein are not interested in mediating concrete, particular, descriptive relations; their interest lies in correctly mediating the explanatory relations that ...

Textausschnitt: 2b Scientific Judgments

32/5 If we shift from common-sense to scientific judgments, we can illustrate another specific type of the general form of reflective understanding. What, are scientists doing when they are making scientific judgments?1 In chapter 2 we discussed the way that Galileo designed certain experimental procedures in order to test his hypothesis that all bodies fall with certain accelerating speeds. If a set of measurements of falling bodies are conditioned as Galileo hypothesized, then bodies will fall at the predicted speeds. But his set of measurements yielded the predicted proportion of distances to durations, and so he was correct in affirming his law of falling bodies. Such a scientific judgment, while it is generally like a common-sense judgment, is also specifically different. (129; Fs)

33/5 In a common-sense judgment you do not decenter yourself from descriptive correlations and recenter yourself as an understander in a world of strictly intelligible correlations; rather, you remain within the world where the sun rises and sets and the earth does not rotate. There is a mistaken tendency to think that common-sense knowers do not mediate their immediate, sensible givens, but they do. As a common-sense knower, you mediate the world of things about you through ordinary linguistic patterns of meanings that make up your native language. You know what things are by learning that language, identifying certain objects in and through their appropriate attributes. (129; Fs)

34/5 Galileo, however, was not patterning his immediate visual field since he had abstracted from descriptive correlates to focus on strictly explanatory correlates which, to be verified, required special experimental procedures. In verifying his hypothesis, Galileo reflected back on an observational field, but it was not an ordinary observational field. It was an experimentally mediated field and, more important, his intent was to reach an ultimate explanatory goal that would mediate, not only immediate experimental observables, but the entire universe of observables. (129; Fs)

35/5 Classical scientists like Galileo, Newton, and Einstein are not interested in mediating concrete, particular, descriptive relations; their interest lies in correctly mediating the explanatory relations that ground and explain why things behave and are seen and heard in the way they are. Thus scientists can explain why you see the sun rising and setting and why such judgments as the sun rises and sets are correct only within a very limited context. To understand and judge things concretely is to judge them comprehensively and completely in their relations to one another and in their particularity. (129; Fs)

36/5 Common-sense judgments focus on concrete particularities, not on the concrete as universal and comprehensive. This explains why Galileo's laws and those of his contemporaries eventually led to the more comprehensive, systematic explanation of Newton, and from Newton to Einstein's even more comprehensive and more unified understanding and judging of the concrete orderings of things to one another in our physical universe. This also explains why common-sense judgments may be certainly correct while scientific judgments are only probable, although converging toward a fully comprehensive explanation. (130; Fs)

37/5 Scientific judgments are cumulatively verified. Thus Galileo's laws of terrestrial motions and Kepler's laws of celestial motion are subsumed within Newton's systematic explanation of both terrestrial and celestial movements. In other words, just as practical knowing assimilates past advances, complementing, modifying, and correcting them, so scientists also correct, modify, and advance past scientific contexts. (130; Fs)

38/5 For example, if we were to trace the history of chemistry from the four-element theory of earth, air, fire, and water which developed in ancient Greek thought to the nineteenth-century ninety-two-element theory, we would have a marvelous example of scientific learning which proceeds, not deductively, but developmentally and discursively, as scientists assimilate, complement, correct, modify, eliminate, and cumulatively advance past, direct, and reflective theoretical understandings. Human learning, whether in practical day-to-day living or in scientific pursuits, proceeds by trial and error, advancing and declining in remarkably different but related ways. (130; Fs)

39/5 To understand and judge this learning, you must know how insights accumulate into systematic unities and then generate further questions and insights that may demand corrections or, more important, a fundamental reversal through inverse insights. Knowing is a dynamic structure of three interrelated levels of cognitive activities that involves a much richer and more complex range of associative cyclings and recyclings of those levels than you could ever explicitly appropriate and formalize. In this interplay of functionally related levels of knowing, it is the second level of understanding that unites the third level of judging to the first level of experience by transforming your outer or inner conscious experiences from potentially intelligible experiences into actually intelligible experiences. (130; Fs)

40/5 For example, once you learn a language, you no longer simply experience familiar objects such as stones, trees, and water; rather, you experience them in truly intelligible ways if you can correctly name them in the familiar common-sense language world in which you live. Or you can experience the same objects in a scientifically probable way if you have acquired a chemical understanding of what stones and water are and why they behave the way that they do. The point is that not only do you verify your experiences of the world about you, but you also verify your intelligible experiences of the surrounding world. The sensible world about you and the felt world within you is mediated, transformed, and made luminous by your insights and judgments. (130f; Fs)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Selbsterkenntnis, Bewusstsein; Unterscheidung, Grundfehler; Tendenz, die unmittelbare Erfahrung für Selbsterkenntnis zu halten; Unterscheidung zwischen Bewusstsein und Aufmerksamkeit (Absicht); Freud: bewusst - unbewusst

Kurzinhalt: The basic mistake in analyzing the notion of consciousness or awareness is to confuse consciousness with attention or intention. This is the problem with Freud's distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness.

Textausschnitt: 41/5 The fundamental problem in knowing yourself as a knower is that, like all of us, you have a spontaneous tendency to think that your immediate experience of your conscious activities is already a knowing of self, whereas it is only an experience of self. Experience of yourself performing these different activities of knowing is an unmediated experience that needs to be mediated by your own inquisitive and reflective wondering. There is a foundational difference, then, between experiencing knowing and knowing knowing. Further, and more important, there is a crucial distinction between experiencing yourself doing knowing and knowing yourself as a knower in and through your acts of knowing as they recur in the different patterns of knowing. (131; Fs)

3. Self as Knower

42/5 Thus far I have been setting forth the clues that would provide you with conditions for appropriating your own cognitional activities. Having set down the meaning and conditions of knowing, you may now ask yourself, Am I a knower?; Do I experience, understand, and judge in the ways we have been discussing? You must answer these questions in terms of your own concrete, conscious activities. However, before the answer is made, it is necessary to clarify just what is meant by the term 'consciousness' or 'awareness.'1 (131; Fs)

3a Consciousness

43/5 The problem in self-appropriation is to develop some familiarity with the distinction between your own activities of knowing and the contents of those activities. Only in appropriating this distinction can you clarify the notion of consciousness. The basic mistake in analyzing the notion of consciousness or awareness is to confuse consciousness with attention or intention. This is the problem with Freud's distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness. Motives are thought to be unconscious because you are not paying attention to them, and so 'attending to' motives supposedly makes you conscious of them. (131; Fs)

44/5 But contrary to this analysis, you can be conscious or aware without paying attention to that awareness. While you are sitting in a chair reading, you are aware of the pressure of your feet on the floor or of your back and buttocks on the chair, but you do not pay attention to this awareness or experience unless some stimuli draws your attention or you deliberately shift your attention to that part of your conscious field. Attending, therefore, does not make you aware - you already are - but it does make you aware in a different way. For example, you may be lying on the beach, gazing absent-mindedly at the sky, when suddenly a sound attracts your attention and you wonder what it is. Wondering does not make you aware; it makes you intelligently aware, inquisitively conscious. Consciousness or awareness, then, is preliminary to attending, and sets the conditions for attending. If you were not already aware, you could not attend. Attending changes the way you are conscious, from being vaguely aware to being selectively and distinctly aware. However, besides the conscious act of attending, there is also you, the conscious subject, who is doing the attending. Consciousness is a characteristic not only of certain acts, but also of the subject's own mode of being. (131f; Fs)

45/5 Consciousness is not something that you can hold up for examination; rather, it is known indirectly through certain conscious acts you perform and through you, the subject, consciously acting. Not all of your acts are conscious. You cannot attend to the way your hair grows, or to the way you make red blood cells. You do these activities, but you do not do them consciously. Nor are all living things conscious. The major difference between a turtle and a tree is consciousness. Turtles are conscious, and certain of their acts are conscious. The tree is not conscious, nor are any of its acts conscious, that is, it does not operate consciously. (132; Fs)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Definition: Bewusstsein; Bewusstsein und Erfahrung als erste Art eines Wissens; 3 Weisen des Bewusstseins; innere- äußere Erfahrung; undifferenzierte Einheit

Kurzinhalt: Consciousness is a quality that is intrinsic to certain acts and to certain types of things. Could we say that consciousness is a way of knowing? Yes, but ...

Textausschnitt: 46/5 Consciousness is a quality that is intrinsic to certain acts and to certain types of things. Could we say that consciousness is a way of knowing? Yes, but it is only a preliminary and very undifferentiated way. For this reason we can also consider that the word 'experience' shares the same meaning as 'consciousness.' To experience the world around you is to be aware or conscious of it, but this is a vague, undifferentiated, preliminary way of knowing. Is consciousness or experience an inward or outward awareness? It is both, since you only become aware of this distinction as you shift attention from outer to inner experiences, or the reverse. Through attentive or selective awareness, the distinction between inner and outer fields of awareness becomes differentiated, but before such selection the inner/outer distinction is not clear and distinct. Clarity and distinctness come from intellectual awareness, not from awareness. There are, therefore, different types of consciousness, awareness, or experience. (132; Fs)

47/5 I defined consciousness as an awareness imminent in certain acts and in the subject of those acts. Just as there are three different levels of knowing, constituted through three different sets of activities, there are three different ways of being conscious: empirically, intelligently, and rationally or reflectively. Besides these different types of consciousness associated with the different levels of knowing, there is the more obvious unity or oneness of consciousness. I say 'more obvious' because you are more easily conscious of yourself in the undifferentiated unity of the self than you are of the three distinct levels of your consciousness. Only after a good deal of self-appropriation of the different levels of knowing are you able to distinguish these three different types of consciousness within the unity that is referred to as me or I. Besides the three different types of consciousness and the unity of the subject, there is a further and more complex aspect of consciousness: the problem of inner and outer awareness. This needs to be carefully scrutinized since it is the source of considerable confusion about the way we know. (132f; Fs)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Bewusstsein, doppeltes; Selbsterkenntnis: befragtes Objekt und Fragender zugleich (Beispiel: Elefant); Missverständnis (Grundfehler): Selbsterfahrung als Selbsterkenntnis

Kurzinhalt: ... while there is a difference between knowing self and knowing elephants, the difference is not in the acts of knowing, but in the fact that, in knowing self, you know yourself twice, first as a questioned object and simultaneously ...

Textausschnitt: 48/5 When you are attending to the outer world through your sensory-motor activities, you have a double awareness of yourself. For example, in paying attention to your visual field, you are attentively aware of this outer field, but you are inattentively aware of your seeing and your self. You may shift your attention from the external, sensible data and start paying attention to your interior, conscious field, and when you do, you begin to experience your seeing and yourself as an object of attention. This means you are beginning to appropriate your own activity of seeing and yourself as a seer. When you do that you have a double awareness. You have an attentive awareness of your activity of seeing and of the subject who does the seeing, but the subject seeing is now objectively experienced, while the subject who is doing the attending is only subjectively experienced. In other words, every time you attend to and wonder about your own inner cognitional activities, you are attentively aware of yourself as an object being questioned, and inattentively aware of yourself as the subject who is doing the questioning. This means that in every act of self-appropriation, you generate a further experience or awareness of 'you,' the subject, which can subsequently be attended to and appropriated. (133; Fs)

49/5 There is a difference, then, between knowing elephants and knowing your own subject. In both cases there is an object to be known, but in the case of self-knowing, the object is your own subject. However, while there is a difference between knowing self and knowing elephants, the difference is not in the acts of knowing, but in the fact that, in knowing self, you know yourself twice, first as a questioned object and simultaneously as experienced questioner. In knowing elephants, you know them as an object experienced, questioned, understood, conceived, reflected on, and judged, but at the same time, you are conscious of yourself, the subject, doing these acts of knowing. This latter awareness of self, however, is only an experience of your activities of knowing, and of you, the knower. The recurrent mistake in knowing self, then, is to assume that experience of self, which is an immediate awareness of self, is also a knowing of self. Experiencing of self is only a preliminary, vague, undifferentiated awareness of self that must be mediated by questions, insights, and judgments. Such mediation is what I have referred to as self-appropriation. (133f; Fs)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Selbsterkenntnis; Selbstwiderspruch, Syllogismus; Inkonsistenz in der Leugnung eines Selbst; Missverständnis der Unmittelbarkeit; Unterschied zw Bewusstsein und Wissen; Transformation des erfahrenden Selbst in ein wissendes

Kurzinhalt: ... Are you a knower? The question may be expressed in the form of a syllogism: If you are a concrete, understandable unity that experiences, understands, and judges, then you are a knower.

Textausschnitt: 3b Self-Affirmation

50/5 With my analysis of consciousness in place, I now return to the question that I put to the reader, Are you a knower? The question may be expressed in the form of a syllogism: If you are a concrete, understandable unity that experiences, understands, and judges, then you are a knower. The conditioned is the statement: You are a knower, if you are a concrete, intelligible unity who experiences, understands, and judges. The field in which these conditions are to be verified is the data of your own consciousness. Are you conscious of yourself sensing, raising questions, getting insights, formulating them into ideas, questioning the ideas, and judging them? It is important to notice the question is not whether you know something. The question is about the performance of your own cognitional activities.1 This is significant because we do not ordinarily think about knowing as 'doing.' Walking and working are examples of 'doing,' but knowing is assumed to be an internal, mental activity that is often contrasted with external exercise. However, it is important to think of knowing as something that you 'do' because in knowing what you 'do' is your self. Knowing is self-making. (134; Fs)

51/5 There are several other important features of the question, Are you a knower? The question is not. Are you necessarily a knower? It is not. Were you always a knower? Nor is it. Will you always be a knower? Rather, the question asks you to make a concrete judgment of fact, here and now. Most surprising is the fact that you cannot escape the answer. You are, in fact, a knower. The reason is that the activities involved in knowing are not necessarily given; nevertheless, they are given, and given quite spontaneously. Like it or not, if your eyes are open and if you are conscious, then you will see. Spontaneously, questions arise and, while you may prevent certain insights from occurring, insights do occur and, just as naturally and inevitably, questions for judging emerge. You do not have to be a knower; you were not always a knower. But still the events of experiencing, understanding, and judging are given, given consciously, and given in your own presence. You may deny you are a knower, but that places you in a concrete contradiction with yourself, a contradiction between your own actual performance and your account of this performance. You have to use your own knowing in the very process of attempting to deny the fact that you are a knower. It is a fact, and facts are precise, public, and final. In this judgment of fact, you are affirming both your own cognitional activities and you, the unity, who operates and exists in and through this recurring scheme of activities. (134f; Fs)

52/5 It is important to note that you cannot know yourself except in and through these activities. Your immediate awareness of yourself misleads you into thinking that you can know yourself directly and immediately. It is true that you can experience yourself or be aware of yourself directly and immediately, but being aware is not knowing; it is only a preliminary to knowing. Your experience of yourself has to be understood, and this understanding transforms your experienced self into an understood self. This mediation, however, stands in need of yet a further mediation by judging before you can reach a limited judgment about who you are. Thus, you actually use your own knowing to mediate your immediate conscious self. In so doing, you are both the subject 'doing' the knowing and the object who is being mediated and known. As a subject you are immediately experienced, but, as object, you are mediated and known. In self-appropriation or self-knowing, you are revealing your identity to yourself. This knowing of self, as a known object, provides the foundation for a science of epistemology and metaphysics. (135; Fs)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Notion des Seins; Frage, Entstehung

Kurzinhalt: Die Frage nach dem Sein als Frage nach dem Wesen der Frage

Textausschnitt: And such an absolute yes or no is what we are seeking. To know what actually is has been our objective right from the first question. It was the desire to know that initiated and sustained the process through the successive steps until the final term was achieved. Because what actually is cannot be known by sensing alone, nor by understanding alone, nor by judging alone, but only by and through the tripartite structure of correct knowing.

() We are trying to appropriate what is the nature of wondering itself. We are asking what we are doing when we are questioning, not in this or that pattern of knowing, but in any pattern of knowing.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Sein; heuristische Struktur des Fragens; Definition des Seins durch die Tätigkeit des Fragens nach dem Sein; Sein als Frage nach der Totalität richtiger Urteile

Kurzinhalt: Definition des Seins durch die Tätigkeit des Fragens nach dem Sein; Sein als Frage nach der Totalität richtiger Urteile

Textausschnitt: 62/5 A correct judgment is absolute only in virtue of the conditions having been given, as you have understood and judged them to be given. But there is nothing conditioned about the final objective since it is not 'virtually unconditioned,' but totally and completely unconditioned. However, since you have not understood and judged everything about everything, and since clarity and precision come from understanding and defining, how can you define what you have not understood? (137; Fs)

63/5 You can know what you do not know by knowing the type of acts through which you will come to know what you do not now know. Thus, both on the second and third level of knowing, you can form anticipatory structures that heuristically define the unknown through those activities that will make it known. This is the significance of implicit, heuristic, or second-order definitions. Rather than defining 'being,' which you do not understand and which you have not judged, you can define the acts and the totality of acts through which this unrestricted unknown will come to be known. 'Being' can be defined as that which you will know through the totality of correct judgments. (137f; Fs)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Unterschied: Notion (notion) - Begriff; Notion des Seins (notion of being)

Kurzinhalt: A notion generally refers to a vague idea or hunch you have about something before you actually come to know or witness it. Notional knowing is a priori knowing, but ...

Textausschnitt: 64/5 It is important to note that you cannot conceive of being until you have understood it, and you will not understand it until you have understood everything about everything, until you have had an unlimited understanding that understands everything concretely and completely. Therefore, this second-order definition of being is not a concept of being, but a 'notion' of being. A notion generally refers to a vague idea or hunch you have about something before you actually come to know or witness it. Notional knowing is a priori knowing, but the a priori in this case is the sort of notional knowing that emerges with wondering or questioning. Notional knowing, then, is knowing the way your own questioning guides you to acts of understanding, and then moves you beyond understanding to correct judging, and beyond correct judging to repeated questioning toward a final objective that has absolutely no limits. Being, then, is a notion defined in terms not of what it is, but of how it comes to be known and will actually be known. Such an account of being or reality seems rather complicated and abstract. Yet everyone spontaneously assumes that things really exist, without getting involved in any complicated, abstract reasoning process. It is important to distinguish between the spontaneously operative notion of being and a philosophical account of what this notion of being is.1 (138; Fs) (notabene)

65/5 We do not have to teach children to question; they do so spontaneously and effortlessly. When children reach a certain age, we do not have to teach them to ask, Is that really so?, Are you just kidding?, Do you really mean it? Such critical questioning is spontaneous, immediate, and natural. Aristotle says the beginning of wisdom is wonder, but he also spoke of nature as 'the imminent principle of movement and rest.' What stirs up a knower is a question, and what quiets such a knower is a correct answer. Questioning and answering are natural to knowers, which means that the desire to know, and to know in an unrestricted way, is what human nature gives to human knowers. (138; Fs)

66/5 It is natural for all people to want to know being or everything about everything. That is why the child spontaneously asks. What is this?, and eventually, Is it really so? A deliberate effort is needed to stop the question. No doubt the child will have to learn that there is a strategy to questioning and that some questions can be answered only after years of study, but to repress and cover over a question deliberately without sufficient reason goes against our nature. Obscurantism in any form is intolerable for the authentic human knower. (138f; Fs)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Epistemologie: Definition; Objektivität (Notion); das Ziel des Fragens und Intendierens

Kurzinhalt: Epistemology is the science that deals with the validity or objectivity of human knowing ... Instead of asking. What am I doing when I am knowing?, you ask. Why do I do knowing?

Textausschnitt: 6. Notion of Objectivity

72/5 Epistemology is the science that deals with the validity or objectivity of human knowing. I have argued that such a science depends on a prior cognitional theory that begins, not by asking about the validity of human knowledge, but by asking about what you, as a concrete knowing subject, are doing when you are 'doing' knowing. The answer is that you are doing three different, but functionally relatable activities which you unite by your own spontaneous wonder. This wonder manifests itself, first, as inquisitive wonder, leading you from experiencing to understanding, and, then, as critical wonder, directing you from understanding to judging. (140; Fs) (notabene)

73/5 After appropriating what you are doing when you are knowing, the question shifts from appropriating your own operations of knowing to the goal intended in all the different patterns of knowing. This shift changes wondering from a cognitional concern to an epistemological concern. Instead of asking. What am I doing when I am knowing?, you ask. Why do I do knowing? The answer is given by appropriating the objective that is sought, naturally and spontaneously, in every form of knowing, namely, some aspect of the real or being. (140; Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Sein, Realität; Definition, Notion, Epistemologie; authentisches Subjekt - objektives Wissen

Kurzinhalt: ... if you are faithful to your own desire to know, letting it unfold and direct your questioning, then that cognitive commitment to your desire to know will make your judgments objective. Paradoxically, being truly or authentically subjective is what ...

Textausschnitt: 74/5 Being or reality is grasped in some limited way by making a correct judgment, which limits you to what you have experienced, understood, and judged such a reality to be. But you want to know more than limited realities, and so your wondering spontaneously leads you beyond any limited, correct judgment toward an unlimited objective. The final comprehensive goal of knowing is to know everything about everything. Being or reality, then, is why knowing is what it is. Our knowing, therefore, becomes knowing whenever you know what is or is not so. That is your objective, and that is what makes you an objective, knowing subject. In other words, if you are faithful to your own desire to know, letting it unfold and direct your questioning, then that cognitive commitment to your desire to know will make your judgments objective. Paradoxically, being truly or authentically subjective is what makes you an objective knower. (140f; Fs) (notabene)

75/5 No doubt for many readers this explanation will seem like an idealist or immanentist theory of objective knowing. The usual epistemological theory begins by assuming a separation of knowing subjects and known objects, and the epistemological problem is then posed by the question, How can I be sure that what I know within my mind corresponds to what is actually out there beyond my knowing mind? If we pose the epistemological problem this way, we are assuming a duality between knowing subjects and known objects. More importantly, we are silently assuming we already know what subjects and objects are because we are assuming that immediate experiencing or perceiving is knowing, and that it is already objective knowing. (141; Fs) (notabene)

76/5 We began this study not with you, the subject, but with your own performance of wondering. Only after you know your own knowing do you come to know yourself as a subject in and through your own knowing. You cannot know yourself directly and immediately, only indirectly and mediately. You can feel yourself directly and immediately, but feeling is an experience, an awareness, that may or may not become the object of your wondering, understanding, and judging. Only if and when your feelings are mediated by acts of understanding and correct judging will you know what these feelings actually are. (141; Fs)

77/5 Further, if these feelings are correctly understood, then the object correctly known is your own feelings. This means that your subjective feelings can become correctly known objects. Similarly, your own subject which is experienced in the act of knowing can become a correctly known object. Knowing is not a known subject confronting known objects; rather, correct knowing constitutes a limited identity between knowers and what they know. If you were an unlimited knower, then your knowing would be perfectly identical with your being, and you would be perfectly identical with yourself and all other beings, as Aristotle recognized.' (141; Fs)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Selbsterkenntnis; Subjekt - Objekt

Kurzinhalt: Selbsterkenntnis ist kein Sonderfall des Wissens; aufgrund der Differenz von Wissen und Sein Differenz in der Identität zw. Subjekt als Subjekt und Subjekt als Objekt; 1. Frage: Was tut man beim Erkennen?

Textausschnitt: Further, if these feelings are correctly understood, then the object correctly known is your own feelings. This means that your subjective feelings can become correctly known objects. Similarly, your own subject which is experienced in the act of knowing can become a correctly known object.

() In other words, while there is an identity between you, the knower, making yourself known, and you, the correctly known object, there is not a perfect identity. If there were, you would be creating yourself in the act of knowing yourself. Your being and your knowing would be the very same act.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Objektivität; 3 Arten; Unmittelbarkeit; Raum, Zeit; inverse Einsicht

Kurzinhalt: empirische, normative und absolute Objektivität; Newton, Einstein, Aristoteles; epistemologischer Grundfehler

Textausschnitt: There are, then, three different forms of objectivity in every correct judgment: empirical objectivity; normative objectivity; and absolute objectivity. If a knower thinks that knowing is a simple one-level activity, that knower will have made the basic epistemological mistake of confusing the first-level immediate givenness of experience with the third-level critically mediated experience.

() The 'absolute' that Newton was seeking in order to guarantee the objectivity of his knowing is to be found not in the concrete immediate givenness of this universe, but in correctly mediated judgments about that immediate givenness.

() This means that correctly mediated facts are within the concrete intelligible universe of being, and not in space and time. Space and rime are simply limits ...

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Epistemologie; 3 Grundfeststellungen

Kurzinhalt: Grundstruktur einer Epistemologie; eine gefühlte Differenz ist noch keine gewusste; Tisch, Luft

Textausschnitt: The core of this new basic context consists in three distinct, but related judgments:
(1) I am a knower;
(2) there are existing objects if I know them through correct judgments, and such objects may be distinguished from one another, only if I know such distinctions through correct judgments;
(3) I am not any one of these known objects that I have judged as real, existing objects.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Epistemologie; Kern; Subjekt; Wissen, Realität

Kurzinhalt: Definition des Subjekts; Identität von Wissen und Realität

Textausschnitt: ... you can define a subject as an object who is a knower.

() The core is that knowing is not one thing and reality another. Reality is known in and through experiencing it, understanding it, and correctly judging it. Reality is intrinsically intelligible, and the intelligible is what is real, provided that it is correctly verified.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Epistemologie; Zusammenfassung; Grundfehler; Objektivität; Horizont

Kurzinhalt: Grundannahme der Grundfehler; Unterschied: Notion, Begriff;

Textausschnitt: Both of these mistakes assume a more primordial and pervasive mistake, which is to assume that subjects and objects are immediately known because reality is already known. And such reality is assumed to be known directly and immediately.

() My approach to the problem of objectivity has been just the opposite. I have assumed that neither you, the subject, nor objects, nor reality can be directly and immediately known. Instead I have identified the three-level structure of knowing, and through it I invited you to take yourself as the object to be understood and affirmed; your own subject becomes the to-be-known object.

FLSK_7/6: What distinguishes a notion from a concept is that a notion is defined, not directly, but implicitly in terms of the cognitive acts through which being becomes known.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Erkenntnistheorie, Epistemologie, Metaphysik; Fragen, Grundfragen

Kurzinhalt: What are you doing when you are knowing? (cognitional theory), then shift to the question, Why is doing that knowing? (epistemological question), then shift to the question, What do you know when you know objectively? (metaphysical question)

Textausschnitt: 1. Traditional Metaphysics

1/6 For the early Greek thinkers, the primary problems were religious and moral, not metaphysical. This way of phrasing the problem is misleading since these early Greek thinkers did not differentiate between religious, moral, and metaphysical questions in the way we do. For these thinkers, the fundamental philosophical question tended to be, What is the best way to live?, rather than, What is the meaning of being? These two questions were certainly related, but with Aristotle the 'being question' and metaphysics took precedence over the moral question about the right way to live. Before proceeding, I need to explain what I mean by 'precedence.' (149; Fs)

2/6 For Aristotle, metaphysics provided the basic context of meanings for the other sciences because metaphysics was concerned with the ultimate causes or constituents of the being of things, insofar as these things were beings.1 Insofar as things move, they become objects for physicists; insofar as things live, they are objects for biologists; insofar as things sense and reason, they are objects for psychologists. But insofar as things are real things or beings, they are objects for metaphysicians. Thus, to study objects as metaphysical objects is to study them in the basic and most comprehensive way. In such a context, not only was metaphysics the most universal way to study objects, but it also provided the basic terms for studying the other, less universal sciences. (149; Fs)

3/6 The approach to metaphysics that we have been proposing, however, is remarkably different. In the first place, we have begun, not with metaphysics, but with cognitional theory. More important, you the reader, have been invited to appropriate that cognitional theory in terms of your own cognitional operations, as distinguished from the contents that become known through these operations. Further, in focusing on the orienting wonder and questioning that precedes, directs, and coordinates these cognitional operations to one another, we have clarified and specified the ultimate objective that we seek whenever and in whatever pattern of knowing we are engaged. (149f; Fs)

4/6 In the second place, this rather different method has led us to an epistemological theory in which the basic terms and relations of the theory are not derived from prior metaphysical terms and relations, as was the case in Aristotle's metaphysical theory of knowing. We have begun with your own actual performances of knowing. The intention was not only to discover the object you intended to know, but more significantly to know you the subject who operates in and through these activities, and who can be known 'objectively' only through your own cognitional activities. This means you can make your own subject the object of knowing, and having made yourself known as one more object within the horizon of all knowing - namely, 'being' - you can then proceed to correlate subjects to objects and to distinguish subjects from objects. To specify how subjects are related to, and distinguished from, objects is to set up a theory of objective knowing, an epistemology. In other words, we have derived a theory of objective knowing from a prior theory of knowing, and we are now about to derive a theory of metaphysics from these prior two theories. In doing so, we have reversed the traditional procedure of deriving the theory of objectivity and knowing from a prior metaphysical theory. (150; Fs)

5/6 The reason for this reversal is methodological. As we saw in chapter 2, once the sciences broke loose from metaphysics and established their own methodical procedures with their own basic terms and relations, these sciences took off. Their remarkable success precipitated an epistemological crisis that set the conditions for Descartes's attempt to find a similar methodical approach to philosophy. With Descartes began the 'turn to the subject' and the beginning of the long process of discovering a new language for mediating, not only the subject, but also the 'operations' through which the subject acts and through which you, the subject, can make yourself known to yourself. (150; Fs)

6/6 The key to understanding this 'turn to the subject' is to appropriate the basic underlying and orienting wonder that directs your cognitional activities, and to appropriate the potentially unrestricted range and the objective of your wondering. To do this methodically, you must move from descriptive to explanatory patterns of knowing. The argument may be summarized this way: to 'explain' why your metaphysical theory operates the way it does, you must disclose how it derives from your epistemological theory; similarly, to 'explain' your epistemological theory, you must disclose how it depends on your own cognitional operations. In other words, to do philosophy methodically, we must start with the question, What are you doing when you are knowing? (cognitional theory), then shift to the question, Why is doing that knowing? (epistemological question), then shift to the question, What do you know when you know objectively? (metaphysical question). (150f; Fs)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Definition: Potenz, Form, Akt; Beziehungen zueinander

Kurzinhalt: Form is defined as that structural component of being to be known through a complete explanatory account of all things as those things are related to one another. Act is the third structural component, ...

Textausschnitt: 10/6 Knowing, then, is not outside being; rather, the structure of knowing corresponds to, and is intrinsic to, the structure of being. To understand and affirm the intrinsic intelligibility of being, it is imperative to understand what it means to move from a descriptive to an explanatory context, and to make that move in such a way that does not discredit descriptive knowing, but that does criticize, recenter, and reorient such descriptive contexts. The metaphysics that we are proposing is an explanatory metaphysics, whose basic terms and relations are the knowers own tripartite, structured activities of knowing, as those structured acts of knowing are oriented by, and dynamically directed to, being. (152; Fs)

11/6 Let us move on to define potency, form, and act. Potency is the structural component to be known in and through a complete intellectual patterning of all experience (the experience of all individuals, of all places and times, of all continuous processes, and of all random or nonsystematic divergencies from expected norms). Potency is to be known through a complete explanatory patterning of all experiences. Potency is not form, but it is functionally related to form. (152; Fs)


12/6 Form is defined as that structural component of being to be known through a complete explanatory account of all things as those things are related to one another. Act is the third structural component, the absolute final and unconditional element that completes and perfects the other two components. Act brings to a final realization and perfection the contribution of form and potency.1 Taken together, these three structural components form a unity since what is experienced is what is understood and what is understood is what is judged. (152; Fs)

13/6 Furthermore, all three components are defined by the term 'form.' Experience presents rather than defines, and act affirms and denies rather than determines and specifies. It is form that specifies, determines, and defines what is presented by experience, while act is also defined by the same form. As well, form is specified as a full explanation of things in their relationships to other things. Thus, potency, form, and act share a common definition, and that definition is anticipatory, or heuristic and explanatory. Furthermore, all three are defined in terms of our own structure of knowing as oriented to an ultimate, unrestricted objective. (notabene)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Potenz, Form, Akt; konjugiert, zentrale

Kurzinhalt: konjungiert, zentral am Beispiel einer Pflanze; 6 metaphysische Grundbegriffe; 4 Grundbeziehungen; Metaphysiker, Wissenschaftler

Textausschnitt: () ... we can distinguish between the conjugate forms and the central form or unity that operates through these conjugate forms. Since these central forms exist in individual or limited ways, we can further identify central act as existence and central potency as the source that individualizes any existing central form. In addition...

() For example, a plant is an organic unity (central form) that exists (central act) in an individualized way (central potency). That same individual existing plant operates (conjugate act) reproductively (conjugate form) in certain particular ways (conjugate potency).

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Potenz, Form, Akt; Metaphysik, Chemie

Kurzinhalt: Gegenüberstellung: Metaphysiker - Chemiker; Gesetzte: konjugate Formen; Verifikation: konjugate Akte; konjugate Potenz; Chemiker über Realität

Textausschnitt: These laws can now be identified as the conjugate forms that relate chemical atoms to one another. Their verification, although probable and provisional, refers to conjugate acts, while the sensible situations and instances in which the laws have been tested refer to conjugate potencies. The metaphysician knows, first, that those chemical laws are intrinsic to the very structure of chemical atoms; second, that there are different types of conjugate forms - classical and statistical; and, third ...

() It is not the business of chemists to know knowing, nor to know why knowing is what it is, nor what you know when you know objectively. That is the business of metaphysicians.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Metaphysik; erklärende, beschreibende Wissenschaft

Kurzinhalt: Nur erklärende, nicht beschreibende Wissenschaft enthüllt etwas von der inneren Struktur der Dinge; ist Kalk weiß?

Textausschnitt: Descriptive knowing does not reveal the intrinsic structure of the being of things and of the reality of their operating relations.

() In setting up a metaphysical, explanatory theory of genera and species, it is important to know whether the science is still in a descriptive, descriptive-explanatory, or purely explanatory stage.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Potenz; Grenze, Möglichkeit

Kurzinhalt: Potenz als Möglichkeit und Grenze; Zyklus von Potenz, Form und Akt

Textausschnitt: Experience as questioned reveals experience as the limit of our present knowing, but at the same time questioned experience becomes an opportunity since we can transform this known-unknown into a known through understanding and judging that experience.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Potenz, Form, Akt; Struktur: klassisch, statistisch, genetisch, dialektisch

Kurzinhalt: Beziehung zw. den 4 heuristischen Grundmethoden und der Metaphysik; je anderes Verhältnis zw. Potenz, Form und Akt

Textausschnitt: Aus: s. unten:

In brief, classical scientists deal with forms, while statistical scientists deal with the relations of these forms to acts. Genetic scientists deal with the way forms emerge from potencies, and dialectical scientists focus on the obstruction of emerging forms.



41/6 Classical insights involve grasping invariant correlations among continuously changing variables, but such correlations are discovered by abstracting from the actual concrete conditions under which these correlates or conjugate forms actually operate. Statistical scientists attempt to understand how often these classical correlations occur in certain concrete conditions or, if they have already occurred and are recurring, then what the probability of their survival is. In verifying such frequencies or probabilities, statistical scientists abstract from the nonsystematic or random variations around these ideal frequencies. In brief, classical scientists deal with forms, while statistical scientists deal with the relations of these forms to acts. Genetic scientists deal with the way forms emerge from potencies, and dialectical scientists focus on the obstruction of emerging forms. I will discuss genetic and dialectical methods after I discuss the finality or indeterminate directed dynamism of the universe, but here I want to restate my earlier contrast between cycles and schemes of correlations or conjugate forms. (160; Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Metaphysik, Weltordnung; biblisch, aristotelisch; Substanz, Akzidens

Kurzinhalt: Gegenüberstellung "alter" und "neuer" Metaphysik

Textausschnitt: The problem with such an account of world-order was that it operated within a descriptive and imaginative context that tended to conceive things as static essences, modified only accidentally and extrinsically in their relationships to one another. Such a world-order had two parts: the inner unchanging essences of things and the outer accidental, sensible properties of things that were contingent and changeable.

() On the basis of a conditioned series of recurrent schemes, we proposed an explanatory world-order, and only after this explanatory world-order had been articulated did we introduce the notion of things which exist and operate in and through their recurring schemes. Having established that things or individual concrete unities operate and cooperate through recurring patterns of activities, we turned to you, the knower

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Universum, Potenz, Form

Kurzinhalt: Grund-Form des Universums: emergent probability

Textausschnitt: The form or intelligibility which informs or explains the unity of these successive, higher levels of beings is 'emergent probability,' and that 'form,' which we have identified as emergent probability, is actually being realized 'in accord with successively changing schedules of probabilities.'

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Entwicklung, Definition

Kurzinhalt: horizontale, vertikale Entwicklung; Spannung zw. Potenz und Form

Textausschnitt: Thus, development can be defined as the emergence of a sequence of higher forms (higher intelligibilities) that resolve the tensions of lower potencies by moving upward to higher forms, while at the same time adjusting to the prior lower stages of achievement.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Entwicklung; Pflanze

Kurzinhalt: 3 Schritte in der Entwicklung der Pflanze; wie eine Formel die Variablen in ein Verhältnis bringt, so die Zelle das anorganische Material

Textausschnitt: Just as the analytic geometer understands numbers and points as dynamic variables which the higher operations transform into new numerical or geometrical correlations, so plants continuously transform lower, inorganic variables into the higher, organic correlations of cellular life.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Entwicklung, Anpassung, Pflanze; Darwin, Lewontin

Kurzinhalt: Nicht nur Anpassung an Umwelt, sondern Schaffung einer Umwelt; nicht nur Integration niederer Schemas, sondern Auftauchen höherer Schemas

Textausschnitt: What Lewontin proposes is that organisms not only adapt to a changing environment, but in different ways constitute their own environment. In a sense, one may say that living organisms do not find their niches within an ecological system, but to some extent they make their own ecological roles insofar as they attempt to control their outer environment. For example ...

() In other words, there is upward, 'creative' movement to adaptation as well as the lower, integrating aspect.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Entwicklung, Anpassung, Tier; Darwin

Kurzinhalt: Bewusstsein; Auge; Entwicklung bottom-up und top-down; psychisches Ganzes als Unterscheidungsmerkmal bei Tieren

Textausschnitt: The unconscious pursuit of organic functions of feeding, mating, and preserving life among plants becomes consciously pursued by animals. () As the analytic geometer discovers new potential in the lower mathematical variables, so animals operate unconsciously to construct cells that make possible their conscious acts of living.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Evolution; Darwin, Korrektur

Kurzinhalt: Nicht boß Entwicklung von Arten, sondern von "Zusammenhängen"

Textausschnitt: Darwin's problem was the evolution of species; more recently the problem has become the evolution of a web of interacting species. Instead of a developing being or specified group of evolving beings, there is the more complex, dynamic whole of the grouping of many different species as they set the conditions for one another's recurrent schemes.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Evolution; Mensch, Sein, Finalität, Universum

Kurzinhalt: Das Streben nach Sein als allgemeines Prinzip; bei der menschl. Entwicklung Kooperation auf allen Stufen; Flexibilität in der Integration niederer Stufen

Textausschnitt: In other words, the human cognitional search for the meaning of being is one instance of the whole universe's directed, dynamic finality to being.

() Development in human beings may be initiated on any level, but on whatever level it originates, the other levels will also be affected, and so there must be a harmonious cooperation at all levels.

() Human development, then, is a very flexible affair involving three different levels which must be integrated, but at the same time there is a wide range of ways in which the higher intellectual operator may cooperate with lower psychic and organic processes.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Entwicklung; Tier, Mensch, Unterschied

Kurzinhalt: Grundunterschied zw meschl. und tierischer Entwicklung

Textausschnitt: The basic difference between human and animal development is that animals have to integrate and operate on organic and psychic levels, while human development requires a three-level development

() Animals cannot significantly reorganize their psychosomatic experiences without acquiring new organs

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Operator, Verstand; Rodins Denker

Kurzinhalt: Abhängigkeit des Bewusstseinsflusses von der Zielsetzung des intelektuellen Operators

Textausschnitt: ... internal and external sensing, remembering, and imagining are all interdependent activities in the continual flow of human consciousness, but the character and organization of that conscious stream depend on the interest and purpose of the higher operator who controls and governs the direction of these conscious flows with various degrees of expertise and mastery.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Selbst, authentisch; Gewohnheit, Habitus, Trägheitssystem, Bewusstsein

Kurzinhalt: Gewohnheiten als Trägheitssysteme; Entwicklung: Änderung der Gewohnheiten; das uneingeschränkte Streben zwingt den Menschen zur "Destabilisierung"; Bewusstsein - vertikale Finalität

Textausschnitt: But you already have developed an integrated self which is presently operating within a circle of recurring schemes that are combinations of habits or conjugate forms, and such habits are inertial systems for sustaining and preserving a range of alternative courses of action and interaction; whereas to develop is to change your habits and to change the self that formed these habits and who was, in turn, formed by the habits.

() To develop, then, implies that you are questioning your own acquired integration of lower and higher schemes as that integration presently operates within you. To develop, then, you as operator must question and destabilize yourself as integrator. There is no way you can prevent this cycle from repeating the same process again because ... We have already pointed out that vertical finality ... becomes conscious at the human level as each knower is caught up in this vast sweep of universal striving toward being.

() The basic tension between your transcending, operating self and your limited, integrated self is analogous to the vertical finality of the entire universe as that finality is being mediated and generalized through the integral, heuristic structure of your own or any other knower's potency, form, and act.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Metaphysik der Geschichte, Finalität

Kurzinhalt: 6 Hauptpunkte der Beziehung zw. metaphysischem und geschichtlichem Wissen

Textausschnitt: Ultimately, the roles that people play are in tune with the vertical finality of the universe of being or, in different ways, they move against that finality.

() (1) Metaphysicians know that all human beings are knowers and that they are ultimately ordered to know being as their final objective. ...

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Spache; Denken, Meinen, Sokrates

Kurzinhalt: Nicht die Sprache erklärt das Denken, sondern das Denken die Sprache; Meinung = Denken +Ausdruck

Textausschnitt: It is not language that explains knowing, but knowing that explains language.

() Meaning is the same as knowing, except that meaning adds to knowing the problem of expressing our knowing to an audience through different linguistic forms. Expressions of any knower's knowing may be adequate or inadequate, clear or obscure, but such expressions by themselves are not true or false. The truth or falsity of statements lies in the acts of judgments made by knowers, who then express those judgments in any language that these knowers may choose and in any appropriate combination of the words and phrases of that language.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Aussage, Wahrheit; wahr, falsch, Definition, Dialektik; Befangenheit (bias)

Kurzinhalt: Definition von Wahrheit und der Richtigkeit einer Aussage; Zirkel zw. Wissen und Sein; 2 Normen von Wahrheit; Ausblenden der Vergangenheit

Textausschnitt: A statement is known as true or false through a 'virtually unconditioned' judgment of our understanding of an experience. ...
Truth, then, may be defined as the correspondence of any knower's knowing to being. Being is what we grasp through correct knowing, or knowing is true by being correctly related to being.

() Thus there are two norms of truth: the limited, absolute norm that is grasped in a precisely limited context of meaning and the remote norm that is immanent and operative in every context which can serve to correlate those limited contexts to one another by relating them to being. ... This is usually done by developing commonly shared memories which screen out a community's dependence on past cultural achievements by degrading and distorting the meanings, values, and general cultural achievements that they have inherited from these prior communities.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Interpretation, Urteil; hermeneutischer Zirkel

Kurzinhalt: Interpratation und richtiges Urteil; 4 Ebenen einer richtigen Interpretation; Geschichte, Sozialwissenschaft

Textausschnitt: 138/6 ... This implies that, in judging the correctness of an interpretation, the context of that judgment may likewise be limited to this sentence or this chapter or a whole essay. However, the fact that the meaning of a sentence depends on the meaning of the paragraph and the meaning of a paragraph on the meaning of the chapters of the book does not imply that different parts of the text cannot be correctly interpreted without understanding the whole text.

140/6 From the metaphysical viewpoint, there are four distinguishable contexts that should be considered. First ...

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Metaphysik, Geschichte; Potenz, Form, Akt

Kurzinhalt: Potenz, Form und Akt der Geschichte

Textausschnitt: 144/6 In brief, the authentic metaphysician knows the potency, form, and act of historical finality. The potency is the totality of materials that are pertinent to the interpretations of any and all texts, while the form is both hermeneutical and historical. It is hermeneutical insofar ...

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Metaphysik, Physik, Analogie; Einstein

Kurzinhalt: Analogie zw. Einsteins Transformationsgleichung und dem Vorgehen der Metaphysiksuch advances to subsequent generations.

Textausschnitt: () This means that the measuring frameworks of scientists can be correlated to one another through a set of transformation equations that can 'equalize' all the different frameworks. This procedure is analogous to the way the notion of being orders objectively the cognitive frameworks of any and all knowers, thereby completely universalizing the potency, form, and act of any knower. A key step in this overall argument is to decenter any and all descriptive knowers and their particular frameworks and to recenter them and their frameworks in the human quest for being. All human knowers are united insofar as they advance in their knowing of being and insofar as they communicate such advances to subsequent generations.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Metaphysik, Ethik

Kurzinhalt: Ethik transformiert Metyphysik

Textausschnitt: () Now we are about to examine how a science of ethics can sublate and transform the study of metaphysics into a new and higher historical context.
()
If a science assumes a world-order governed by necessary causes, then that ordering cannot be changed, which also implies that such a science will not be directed to, and concerned with, 'praxis.' Science, however, no longer seeks certain necessary laws, but seeks instead the best available explanations. And modern science assumes not a static, closed universe, but an open, dynamic, developing universe.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Ethik, Metaphysik; Aristoteles, Nikomachische Ethik, Scholastik, 4. Ebene

Kurzinhalt: Frage nach Wille und Verstand als Seelenvermögen contra: Lösung durch die Theorie der 4. Ebene; 3 Grundfragen

Textausschnitt: () ... medieval question of the superiority of intellect over will or of will over intellect. In the traditional Scholastic position, our intellect proposes (specifies) a course of action to our will.
()
To shift to an ethics of the concrete subject, then, is to shift to an ethics based on appropriating our own conscious activity of choosing, and not on the unconscious faculty of will. This does not imply that an ethics based on the metaphysics of the soul was necessarily incorrect, any more than a metaphysics based on first principles was necessarily mistaken. Rather, the problem with such a metaphysics was that it lacked empirical controls.
()
The activity of understanding sublates, transforms, and extends the range of the lower sensible and imaginable activities. Judging similarly introduces a still higher new level of operation that transforms understanding and initiates new sources of knowing that go beyond understanding. Finally, the activity of choosing or deciding operates on a fourth level which significantly transforms, subsumes, and goes beyond judging. Such a method readily solves the problem of the superiority of the intellect versus will since it discloses how deciding subsumes and transforms knowing.
()
I will ask, What am I doing when I am deliberating? Second, instead of asking, Why do I know?, I will ask, Why do I decide? Third, instead of asking, What do I know when I do knowing?, I will ask, What do I choose when I make choices?

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Ethik; Urteil, Entscheidung

Kurzinhalt: Strukturähnlichkeit: Urteil - Entscheidung;

Textausschnitt: () Appropriating your own activity of deciding is similar to what you do when you are judging. Judging has three characteristics:

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Ethik; Entscheidung; Bedingtes, Unbedingtes; Gutheit, Gefühle

Kurzinhalt: Entscheidung: kein bedingtes Unbedingtes; Frage nach dem Wert; Was soll ich tun?; Gefühle als Kriterium

Textausschnitt: () In judging, we are dealing with what in fact is so, or probably is so. In deciding to buy a home or to get married, however, the deliberating can go on indefinitely
()
How do I judge the true value of things? In the traditional vocabulary the question would read, How do I know the goodness of things?, or more important, the goodness of a proposed course of action. Implied in this question is the further question of moral norms.
()
Again, the basic clue can be found in the question, Ought I to do this?, or Ought I to continue to do this?
() ... to evaluate this proposal, you must understand the feelings that are evoked in considering the project, since it is through understanding the feelings that you will judge the value of the project.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Ethik; Werturteil, Gefühl, intentional

Kurzinhalt: Unterscheidung: intentionale und nicht-intentionale Gefühle; Notwendigkeit des Verstehens der intentionalen Gefühle; Algebra, - Gesundheit

Textausschnitt: () A major distinction has been made between intentional and non-intentional feelings.
()
The key point is that, before you can judge the value of such feelings, you must understand them since such understood feelings mediate the values or disvalues of what you will decide.
()
... before you judge the value of your feelings you must first understand what these feelings are. As felt, the feelings are experienced but they are not yet understood, although they are open to understanding and to judging. Only as understood and judged can feelings be asserted to be truly or probably worthwhile ...

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Ethik; Werte, kulturell, transzendente; Rangordnung; Kultur; Sollen, Bewusstsein

Kurzinhalt: Soziale, kulturelle, ontologische, transzendente Werte; Rangordnung; Bewusstsein des Sollens; Entscheidung: Existenz in einer neuen Weise

Textausschnitt: () Finally, the supreme value is the unrestricted and completely transcendent value that is the orienting desire of all knowers and choosers and that therefore sets the conditions for all the different levels of valuing, or for the whole scale of values.
()
In deciding, you make a commitment, not just to know something, but to bring some course of action into being which, if you do not do it, will not exist. And, more surprising, it is not only the course of action that will begin to be, but you yourself will begin to exist in a way that you did not exist before making that decision.
()
Further, such a valuable way of being and living ought to be realized, and you are conscious of this 'ought-ness.' You are aware that you, as a chooser, ought to choose to live in this 'choice-worthy' way because

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Ethik; Freiheit; Willkür, Verfplichtung, Paradox: Freiheit als Selbst-Verpflichtung

Kurzinhalt: The paradox of freedom is that to live freely is to live in an obligatory way. But it is you who obliges yourself. Your own intelligence obliges you, as does your self-evaluating self; ...

Textausschnitt: 27/7 The paradox of freedom is that to live freely is to live in an obligatory way. But it is you who obliges yourself. Your own intelligence obliges you, as does your self-evaluating self; you command yourself to be and to behave in truly worthwhile ways. In other words, there arises a spontaneous desire to maintain a consistency between your knowing and doing. However, to oblige yourself does not mean that your actions will necessarily follow. It means that, if they do follow, it is because you did what you had decided was the right thing to do. Obligation is not necessity. To live freely is not to live in an indeterminate or arbitrary way, but to live in a self-knowing, self-evaluating, self-choosing way. A free self is a 'determined' self, but it is you who does the determining. (201; Fs)

28/7 We are born not as actual knowers and choosers, but as potential knowers and choosers who need to develop biologically, psychically, intellectually, and emotionally before we can decide for ourselves what we are to make of ourselves. We are not considered reasonable until we are about seven years old, and we are not considered responsible choosers until we have reached a certain stage of maturity. In the meantime, what we do is not knowing and deciding, but believing that the knowing and deciding of others is truly worthwhile. (201f; Fs)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Liebe, Hierarchie

Kurzinhalt: 4 Arten der Liebe; Mann - Frau, sozial, selbst, transzendenter Grund; transzendente Liebe als Grundlage aller lieben

Textausschnitt: () A brief look at the four different types of love will reveal that loving, like valuing, is also hierarchical.
()
To establish an authentic scale of values, then, depends on appropriating the totally transcendent love that grounds the orientation of all other loves. This is religious love, the subject of the next chapter.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Symbol, Logik; Kultur

Kurzinhalt: Logik der Symbole; Institution, Kultur

Textausschnitt: () How do such symbols or symbolic meanings operate? What is the logic of symbols by which we persuade ourselves, or allow others to motivate us, to act in a certain way?
()
Institutions are what people do; culture is why they do it.
()
Just as the nineteenth century brought about a reversal in the priority of practical intellect over speculative intellect, in the twentieth century we have come to realize that symbolic emotional reasoning has a priority over cognitive or theoretical reasoning.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Kultur; Symbol

Kurzinhalt: Lenkung der Ängste und Sehnsüchte durch die Kultur; Forderung nach transkulturellen Normen

Textausschnitt: () We experience the world spontaneously not as knowers or as choosers, but in terms of our desires and fears. Such desires and fears are transcultural, but how they are cultivated depends on the practices and symbols of the cultural world we are born and reared in.
()
If we now repeat our first question, What am I doing when I am deliberating and deciding?, the answer can be briefly stated in the context we have just articulated. When we deliberate and decide, we are doing so in the context of cultural norms and standards that we believe to be authentic and truly valuable.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Ethik; Notions, Wert

Kurzinhalt: Notion des Wertes; transzendentaler Wert; Spannung zw. begrenzt und unbegrenzt

Textausschnitt: () When you have formed and chosen all the truly valuable choices that you are capable of making, you yourself will be, and you will have committed yourself to that which is transcendentally valuable.
()
Similarly, choosing objectively depends both on knowing the transcendental notion of value and on knowing correctly your own fourfold structure of choosing: experiential, normative, critical, and evaluative. What unites these partial objectives is you, the chooser, who is oriented to an infinitely valuable objective.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Ethik, Grundirrtum; Antizipation

Kurzinhalt: Grundfehler der Wertewahl; Korrektur: Unterscheidung zw. sinnenhaften und intentionalen Gefühlen; Medizin; antizipiertes Gefühl

Textausschnitt: () We identified the fundamental error in knowing as mistakenly assuming that sensible experiencing is the normative and critical component in the tripartite structure of knowing; in choosing, the foundational error is to mistakenly assume that sensibly affective experiences provide the normative grounding for making judgments of value.
()
The fundamental mistake in choosing is to assume that sensible feelings and satisfactions are what make your choices valuable. To correct this mistake, it is necessary to appropriate and appreciate the difference between sensible and intentional feelings, which we discussed in the previous section.
()
For example, you take nasty-tasting medicine because ()You realize that the unpleasant feelings you first feel in exercising can be gradually transformed into feelings of satisfaction or even enjoyment. When that happens, exercising is not only valuable, but also pleasurable, and you made it pleasant by pursuing the intrinsically valuable goal of being healthy.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Ethik; Werte, sozial, kulturell

Kurzinhalt: Soziale, kulturelle, Werte; Präferenz personaler Werte; Kultur setzt die Bedingungen der Fragen der Menschen

Textausschnitt: () But if you live in a society that has no science of metaphysics, you cannot wonder in any explicit, theoretical way about the nature of reality or of being. Similarly, if you live in a society that has no explicit moral theory, then you cannot wonder in any systematic way about the morality of the memories, meanings, and values that you and your community are currently living.
()
Thus, the value of a social order depends on whether it conditions and encourages its members to become valuable persons to one another and to themselves. This is why personal values are to be esteemed higher

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Ethik; transkulturelle Norm; Umkehr

Kurzinhalt: Ausrichtung an einem transzendenten"Objekt" als Maßstab für die transkulturelle Norm; moralische Umkehr

Textausschnitt: () ...the ground of your evaluation of yourself as a self-chooser depends on your own openness and your ability to respond to a transcendental objective that orients you to the potentially infinite self that you are not, but could be.
()
To be an authentic moral chooser is to choose in the context of a true scale of values. And to set up such a scale of values ... it is necessary to have an absolute on which to lay the foundation. This absolute foundation is your own self as chooser oriented to a totally transcendent objective.
()
How do you know if you are a self-transcending chooser? By appropriating the conscious tension between yourself as a cultural chooser and yourself as transculturally oriented to an objective that transcends your cultural community.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Ethik; Gut, Wert, Definition

Kurzinhalt: 3 Bedeutungen von Gut anhand eines Beispiels (Pullover); Definition von Wert; kurzfristige u. langfristige Kontexte als Grundlage für Entscheidungen

Textausschnitt: () ... Here are two distinct meanings of good:
()
The notion of value results from a combination of these two distinct notions of the good, as they are brought together in a personal choice. Value is the good, not as an object spontaneously desired, but as intelligently understood, judged, and chosen.
()
The challenge for the human community is to bring those long-term historical currents out of the background of the meanings and values that precondition our deliberating and deciding and into the foreground of our knowing and choosing.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Ethik; Kultur, Natur; Periode, Geschichte

Kurzinhalt: Ordnung der Produktion; Natur als Konstante, Kultur als Variable; Periodisierung der Geschichte nach der Weise der Kontrolle über die Funktionen des Wissens und Wählens; 3 Perioden

Textausschnitt: 102/7 The distinction between economic producers and the means by which they generate an economic order is an application of the basic distinction that has been at work throughout this study - the distinction between the operations by which we know and choose and the contents that are known and chosen through those operations.
()
Nature is the constant, and culture is the genetic and dialectical variable. All people are by nature knowers, choosers, and lovers ...
()
We can mark off major periods in the history of culture by the way different historical communities control these functions of knowing and choosing, or by the different methods that cultures have developed to govern their personal and collective making of history.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Wahl, Kultur, Ordnung, Authentizität

Kurzinhalt: Ziel der Gemeinschaft: die Ermöglichung der Authentizität des Menschen; Wahl des Menschen: Wahl eines Gutes wird zur Wahl für eine kulturelle Ordnung

Textausschnitt: () The goal of the human community, however, is not primarily to set up social orders. Rather, it is to construct cultural orders that will permit and encourage the community's members to discover their own authentic identities as disinterested knowers who desire to know being.
()
What we choose when we make choices may be concrete particular goods, but these choices also make us participants in our own social and cultural order as that order is at present operating in ways that may or may not be in tune with the authentic order of the entire universe of being.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Freiheit: radikales Problem (Befangenheit); Spannung zw. Wissen und Tun, aktuellem Tun und Wahl; Beispiel: Piano

Kurzinhalt: Human freedom is a radical problem, and just how radical it is can be disclosed if we again ask, Why do people fail to do what they know they ought to do? The biases ...

Textausschnitt: 6. Human Freedom

116/7 There is a further dimension to this problem of becoming an authentic chooser, namely, the problem of our freedom in executing what we know and value to be better ways of being and behaving personally and collectively. Our moral conscience is a conscious correlation not just between our knowing and choosing, but also between what we choose to do and what we actually do. The much more serious and intractable moral problem is that we do not do what we know we ought to do. Smoking provides a good example. Millions of Americans smoke. We do not have to educate them about the verified statistical correlation between smoking and cancer; for the most part, they believe the experts. Smokers know why they should not smoke, and we do not have to convince them to try to stop smoking - most have already tried and failed. They are free to stop, but they are unable to actualize their freedom. Smokers are essentially free to exist as non-smokers, but they are unable to bring their being as non-smokers into existence. And so smokers have to exist in an inauthentic way since their actual recurring schemes of smoking cannot be reconciled with what they know and would choose as a more valuable way to behave. Such people exist in a self-contradictory way. They may escape the contradiction by seeking various forms of rationalizing, but they cannot completely silence their questions. Unless they meet their own conscious demand, a certain unease accompanies such rationalizing. Thus, the spontaneous demand emerging from our own evaluating and deliberating is that we actually do what we think is truly worthwhile doing. (225; Fs)

117/7 Freedom is not indeterminism. Quite the opposite: freedom involves determinism, but it is we who do the determining, or it is we who ought to determine the worthwhileness of ourselves as self-choosing beings. Ironically, to be free is to oblige ourselves to become a truly valuable self by doing truly valuable deeds. Only then, as Aristotle said, will we be a true friend to ourselves and become a source of other people's admiration and affection. (225f; Fs)

118/7 The same dialectical tension between choosing and doing which emerges in our personal lives also characterizes our communal living. Political leaders already know more intelligible and worthwhile ways to arrange our social order, but they also know that such plans and policies are impractical. By 'impractical' they mean that such courses of actions are actually practical, but they have to be agreed upon and chosen by the governing body, and there are not sufficient votes to pass such policies. There are vested interest groups within the body politic that will block these truly worthwhile policies, because they do not serve their own interests. Such interest groups are free to back such policies, but they refuse to actualize the making of a more valuable social order. Just as self-knowers try to make reasonable their unreasonable courses of action, so dominant social classes rationalize their unwillingness to construct a more intelligible and valuable social order because it might be disadvantageous to their own way of living. The evidence of such behavior in history is massive; groups of people who initiated and sustained conditions for a successful and truly valuable social order will frequently change from a creative minority into a dominant minority that refuses to adapt to changing social conditions.1 (226; Fs)

119/7 Human freedom is a radical problem, and just how radical it is can be disclosed if we again ask, Why do people fail to do what they know they ought to do? The biases we form are simply our own elaborate and very effective cover-ups and the cultural rationalizations that we have inherited and will hand on to the next generation. What makes this problem so radical is that it cannot be solved by a better education or a more comprehensive intellectual enlightenment. Nor can it be solved by assimilating the moral and metaphysical theory that I have been setting forth here. The intrinsic tension exists between what we know and what we choose to do in light of that knowing because our willingness to act in a certain way is an acquired, not a spontaneous, willingness. (226; Fs)

120/7 For example, you may spontaneously desire to play the piano, but you cannot play the piano spontaneously, nor can you learn to play the piano simply by reading books on how to play the piano. You must practice until you have acquired the habit of playing. Once you have formed the habit, then you do not need to be persuaded to play, nor do you have to persuade yourself, since you have acquired, beyond the natural spontaneous desire to play, the newly formed spontaneities that flow from such acquired habits. (226; Fs)

121/7 People are not born naturally courageous or cowardly. Such personal characteristics are acquired. Similarly, people are born, not with a culture, but with a nature. Culture comes from the acquired habits of meanings and motivations that we develop by growing up and living within culture. Finally, we are not born free. We are born choosers, but we are not born with habits of choosing. We must develop the habits that will make our choices more or less effectively free. There is, therefore, a fundamental difference between our potency to be free - the essential freedom that comes from our natures -and the effective freedom we have to win by doing what we know we ought to do. Potential freedom becomes actual freedom only when we make it actual. In doing so, we bring our potential being into actual existence.2 (226f; Fs)

122/7 To solve the problem of personal and collective bias, we need the love that would provide us with spontaneous willingness. One of the most obvious effects of love is the new spontaneities it gives us to do things for the person we love. Our problem is not choosing to do good things for one person, but choosing wisely and willingly within the whole ordering of history. To solve the problem of evil or bias, we need a new ordering of our cultural and historical way of being. In short, the problem arises as a moral problem, but there is no moral solution. Only through some higher form of human living can the problem of moral weakness be resolved. The next chapter will raise the possibility of a religious solution to this problem of moral impotence. (227; Fs)

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Ethik, Zusammenfassung

Kurzinhalt: Neuordnung zw. Ethik und Metaphysik; Zusammenhang zw. Wahl und kulturellem Kontext; Kultur, Wert-, Tatsachenurteil; Glaube

Textausschnitt: () Just as metaphysics grows out of knowing your own knowing, so ethics can unfold by knowing your own choosing and the ways choosing operates to subsume and carry knowing to a higher plane of perfection.
()
this methodical approach brings to philosophical attention the fact that moral choices are made within a cultural context or horizon which has been and is assimilated by all cultural choosers from their earliest conscious living. This cultural context is mediated primarily through the language of symbolic forms.
()
the scale of values that is operating in the actual performances of any historical community is either open or closed to the remote goal of human history.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Gott, Definition

Kurzinhalt: Heuristische Definition Gottes,

Textausschnitt: () God, then, can be defined heuristically and implicitly as the completely valuable objective of all your questioning and desirings that you do not yet know and have not yet loved.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Einheit; Ebenen, Chor

Kurzinhalt: Bild: Madrigal; Einheit der Ebenen des Bewusstseins

Textausschnitt: () To differentiate your own levels of experience is like listening to a motet or madrigal with four voices singing in different registers. To differentiate four simultaneously heard voices is difficult enough, but after attending to and differentiating their melodic, rhythmic, and tonal differences, you must go further and attend to their blending and integrating patterns which are producing the changing textures and harmonies that you are hearing.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Erfahrung, religiöse, Grundschwierigkeiten

Kurzinhalt: Religiöse Erfahrung; Erfahrung differenziert, undifferenziert; 3 Schwierigkeiten

Textausschnitt: There are three notable difficulties in identifying and appropriating such religious experience. First, the notion of experience ...
Second, the term 'religious' is a term loaded with affective meanings ...
Third, 'religious experience' refers to an immediate, pre-linguistic experience

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Erfahrung, religiöse, R. Otto, James, Maslow

Kurzinhalt: Das Numinose, das ganz andere; Rudolf Otto, William James, Abraham Maslow; peak-experiences, plateau-experiences, nadir-experiences

Textausschnitt: () Instead of focusing on the nature and existence of god, or on religious morality, Otto attempts to describe the 'engendering religious experiences' that provided the sources for specific religious writings and practices.
()
In order to communicate this 'mystical experience' to the masses, the church officials tended to express such 'transcendent experiences' in various systems or codes of ordinances that regulate the religious beliefs and behavior of the church members. The result is that the original 'mystical experiences' tend to be neutralized and transformed into external symbols and ceremonies.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Erfahrung, religiöse; M. Eliade, Ontologie, archaische

Kurzinhalt: Mircea Eliade, Phänomenologie; archaische Ontologie;

Textausschnitt: () Such myths provide a people with an explanation of how and why things began to be. Because these myths account for the origin of the being of things, Eliade refers to them as 'ontological' stories whose meanings are expressed and communicated symbolically.
()
Probably more than any other scholar of this century, Eliade is responsible for making people aware that knowing a community means understanding their myths, not in any abstract way, but as those myths were or actually are being lived by the people who have come to believe them by living and performing them. For Eliade, a myth can lose its 'lived meaning'
()
In other words, any social, political, or economic activity of primitive communities had an origin that was analogous to the origin of the cosmos out of chaos.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Erfahrung, religiöse; primitive Gesellschaften

Kurzinhalt: Partizipation an der Ordnung durch Ritus und Mythos;

Textausschnitt: () The nature of this creation story or cosmogonic myth varies according to different cultures and times, but these culturally or historically 'variable meanings' are grounded in a transcultural structure of a cyclical passage from disorder or chaos to an ordered cosmos, or from death to rebirth.
()
In other words, while performing these ceremonies, the people were collectively involved with the divine powers and forces that formed the being of all beings. Such a metaphysical myth, however, was not a cognitive or moral metaphysics, but a sacred metaphysics

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Erfahrung, religiöse; Aufklärung, Kant, Otto, Eliade

Kurzinhalt: Natürlich, übernatürlich; Kant: natürliche Religion; Eliade, Otto: das Irrationale

Textausschnitt: () In our post-Enlightenment period, it is difficult for us to appreciate these primitive attitudes. The extraordinary achievement of Renaissance science ...
()
Kant explicitly excluded 'numinous experiences' from such a 'reasonable' religion and morality. Unfortunately, when Rudolf Otto, under the influence of the Kantian tradition, reintroduced 'numinous experiences' as the core or essence of religious experience, he also described such experiences as 'irrational' ...
()
Thus Eliade describes supernatural experiences as a symbolic passage from one way of being to other. Just as in creation the cosmos passes from non-being to being, so at birth the embryo passes from the womb of the mother (earth) to life.
()
The central issue for Eliade is that, for archaic and primitive people, there are two modes of existing: the profane and the sacred. What myths and rituals mean for these people is a passage or transformation from a lower way of being to a new higher mode of being, from the natural to supernatural mode, from the secular to sacred.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Mythos, Eliade, Symbol, Wasser, Sünde, Eliade

Kurzinhalt: Arachaische Stufe: 2 Weisen der Existenz; transkulturelle Ethik im Mythos und in der Moderne; Definition der archaischen Religion

Textausschnitt: () The central issue for Eliade is that, for archaic and primitive people, there are two modes of existing: the profane and the sacred. What myths and rituals mean for these people is a passage or transformation from a lower way of being to a new higher mode of being, from the natural to supernatural mode, from the secular to sacred.
()
These rites have a super-human origin, and by performing them, the novice initiates a super-human, divine action. It is important to note this, for it shows once again that the religious man wants to be other than he finds himself on the natural level ..
()
Primitive man undertakes to attain a religious ideal of humanity, and his effort already contains the germs of all the ethics later elaborated in evolved societies.
()
Archaic religion can be defined as a set of mythic rituals that specify various personal and social passages which are ontological transformations in that they involve a conversion from one mode of being to a higher way of existing.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Israel, Moses, Eliade

Kurzinhalt: Israel - Heilszeit; Unterschied zu archaischen Religionen

Textausschnitt: () ... for the Israelites to remember and recite events associated with Moses was not to step out of profane times and enter into a mythic time, but rather to return to a historical event that happened at a particular time and place to a particular person.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Israel, Heilsgeschichte, Zukunft; Natur, Geschichte, Moses, Propheten

Kurzinhalt: Mythische Vergegenwärtigung - Heilsgeschichte; Zukunft; Wechsel von Natur zu Geschichte; Jahwe, Moses, prophetische Revolte; der transzendente Gott

Textausschnitt: () The question we now need to pose is, How did the Israelite people develop the symbolic expressions that transformed their prior myths and rituals from static, cosmic cyclical forms to changing historical forms?
()
To put the future in the future and not in a return to the past would seem to 'straighten out' the temporal sequence and provide us with a historical narrative. But there is the more subtle, ontological problem that we live in past, present, and future meanings simultaneously, and yet experience them successively.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Israel, Voegelin, Propheten, David, Heilsgeschichte, Jahwe

Kurzinhalt: Voegelin: 3 Stufen der prophetischen Verkündigung; vom Stamm zu Söhnen (Sohn) Gottes; Friedrick Heiler; der ganz Andere

Textausschnitt: () Eric Voegelin, who has identified three stages in the prophetic religious experiences and in the expression of those experiences. In the first stage ...
()
Yahweh begins as one of many divinities or nature gods and evolves into the totally transcendent god who also dwells in the hearts of the converted person. Similarly, the community begins as a tribal community of liberated slaves committed to the god of Moses, only to undergo numerous changes ending with the possibility of receiving God's own spirit in their heart, thereby becoming the 'sons of god.'

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Entwicklung, religiöse; Authentizität; Ordnung, Unordnung

Kurzinhalt: Religiöser Weg: Reinigung -> Erleuchtung -> Einigung; religiöse Grunderfahrung: von Unordnung zu Ordnung; von Unauthentizität zur Authetizität

Textausschnitt: () A key characteristic of all the world's religion is the discipline of asceticism and purgation. If religious conversion calls us to a transcendence of self, that call is also a denial of our former, inauthentic self, the self that needs to be purged and disciplined. Religious development is through purgation to illumination, and through illumination to a growing communion and union with a transcendent other.
()
In discussing primitive religious experience, I identified the core experience as a passage from disorder to order. In discussing here the dialectic of an inauthentic and authentic religious living, I have characterized religious development as an analogous passage or conversion from the disorder of religious inauthenticity to a growing authenticity that embraces our total self- cognitional, moral, and religious.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Glaube, Glaubensüberzeugung; Propheten, Wort

Kurzinhalt: "Inneres" und "äußeres" Wort; Glaubensüberzeugungen, transzendente Quelle; transzendenter Wert als Maßstab

Textausschnitt: () This religious illumination which proceeds from being in love may be named 'faith ...
()
Prior to the traditional beliefs and rituals of different cultural communities, there is the transcendent source and origin that may be discerned in the religious commitments of various religious communities.
()
While the word of the prophet is a 'revealed word' that can be discerned only by persons who have received the same religious love and faith, it does not go against a person's own 'natural' reason.
()
The prophets preached a hierarchy of values based on the transcending value of their encounter with the living presence of Yahweh. This transcending value was intended to transform and revalorize the cultural and personal values the people were living.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Stadium, religiöse; Israel, Jahwe

Kurzinhalt: Integration persönlicher Religiosität von der kulturellen Stufe

Textausschnitt: The ability to integrate and harmonize religious loving with patriotic and domestic loving and living depends to a large extent on the historical, cultural stage in which we are born. For example, for the Israelite people it was only after two hundred years of the prophetic revolt that some Israelites were able to begin to distinguish the Kingdom of Yahweh from the political kingdom in which they were living.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Stadium, religiöse; Kontrolle

Kurzinhalt: Kontrolle der Werte; 4 Stufen (Stadien) der Kontrolle: literarisch usw.; klassische Kultur; fehlende Thematisierung der Transzendenz

Textausschnitt: () The stages of human historical process will depend on the methods that people have developed to deliberately control their lived meanings and values. Through such 'controls of meaning' communities may become more reasonable and responsible in the various arrangements of their cooperative and personal living.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Zusammenfassung

Kurzinhalt: Zusammenfassung des ganzen Anliegens

Textausschnitt: In other words, the basic human challenge is to become religiously, morally, and intellectually authentic. For any concrete knower, chooser, and lover, to be authentic is to have appropriated the basic tension between unrestricted capacity and restricted achievements. More concretely, this means that individuals or a community have to have appropriated the distinction between their lived, cultural selves and their potential selves, which may always be further developed. Such development in turn depends on a dialectical interpretation of the inherited, historical currents of meanings and values that form the context or horizon of that community, and such a dialectical interpretation assumes a metaphysical, moral, and religious integrating structure.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Methode, Logik

Kurzinhalt: Lonergansche Methode im Gegensatz zu: Logik, Methode im rein wissenschaftlichen Sinn

Textausschnitt: () Method,' as I have used the term, refers not only to the operations required to carry out a project and the orientation that normatively directs these operations, but also to you the operator who performs the operations, which is why I have referred to the method as 'self-appropriation.
()
The much broader method is to control, not the clarity and coherence of the contents that are meant, but the operations that originate and generate the meanings and the orientation that directs those operations.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Methode; Grundmethode, Metaphysik

Kurzinhalt: Grundmethode -> Sein, spezielle Methode: Gegenstand; das bekannte Unbekannte; 4 spezialisierte Methoden; Beispiel: Galileo, Locke, Newton, Kant

Textausschnitt: () I began this study by identifying the objective of wondering as an unknown that becomes known through successive, cognitional operations. These operations, as functionally correlated, could provide dynamic, normative procedures for revealing the unknown objective. I contrasted the restricted, cognitive operations and their proximate objectives with the unrestricted ...
()
I identified four different specialized methods - classical, statistical, genetic, and dialectical
()
Because Galileo did not know the difference between practical, common-sense knowing and its objectives and theoretical knowing and its objectives, he made a historically disorienting distinction between primary and secondary qualities of things.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Methode, Metaphysik, Empirismus; Einstein

Kurzinhalt: Tendenz zum Empirismus; Relativitätstheorie; Newton -> Einstein; Ironie des Übergangs

Textausschnitt: () Metaphysicians also know that in any correct act of judgment there are three limited objectives: ...
()
... tendency, first, to reduce the tripartite functioning of human knowing to sensible knowing; second, to reduce the tripartite objectivity of objective knowing to empirical objectivity; and, third, to reduce the tripartite reality of experienced, understood, and judged reality to experienced reality.
()
... the metaphysician can distinguish between the ordinary, sensory-motor frameworks within which animals and humans operate and the strictly intellectual frameworks which mediate and transform in an explanatory manner the descriptive, sensory-motor frameworks in and through which we immediately and spontaneously sense the world around us.
()
The irony of this shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian world-orders is that our physical universe was reduced from an infinite universe to a finite, limited universe, while the possibility of a potentially infinite and intelligible universe opened up.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Methode; Metaphysik, Ethik, Moral, Zyklus

Kurzinhalt: Parallele zw. ethischer und metaph. Methode; deskriptive -> erklärende Moral: Einzelgut u. Ordnungsgut, Zyklen (lang, kurz); Verhältnis zw. Nah- und Fernziel; religiöse Bekehrung

Textausschnitt: () Cognitive knowing begins with an unknown objective that becomes known through successive, partial objectives; moral knowing begins within an unknown and unchosen objective that becomes known, valued, and chosen through successive partial objectives. The problem of differentiating these partial moral objectives is similar to the problem of differentiating the components of objective knowing.
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A person makes what seems to be an authentic choice according to the normative practices of their culture, but it turns out to actually be an inauthentic choice according to the transcultural norm that operates within every person.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Ethik, Bekehrung, religiöse; das Andere

Kurzinhalt: Religiöse Bekehrung; "erweiterte" empirische Methode (Bewusstseinsdaten)

Textausschnitt: () Such religious conversion involves a response on the part of a person or community to a 'totally other.
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Such an authentic conversion is, therefore, primarily a call to practice more morally and reasonably ordered ways of human living.
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So to the method we have pursued in this study is also empirical, but it is a generalized empirical method because, in addition to appealing to immediate sensible data as scientists do, we have also appealed to the immediate data of our own conscious experiences. This appeal has been directed not primarily to subjects or objects, but to the operations through which subjects and objects are mediated cognitively, morally, and religiously.

Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Notion des Seins (notion of being): das Objekt des Fragens und Intendierens; Beispiel: Realität eines Baumes

Kurzinhalt: It is important now to shift attention to the object, content, or term of the questioning ... eing, therefore, is intrinsic to every individual being, but at the same time, it transcends ...

Textausschnitt: 5b All-Pervasive Notion of Being

67/5 My emphasis in explaining the notion of being thus far has been on the questioning or intending, not on the object questioned and intended. It is important now to shift attention to the object, content, or term of the questioning and to appropriate the way the notion of being underlies, penetrates, and transcends every object questioned or intended. Questions move on three distinct, yet relatable levels, which means that the contents known on these different levels needs to be specified. The question. What is a tree?, transforms the sensibly experienced and named tree into a potentially intelligible experience, which permits us to wonder about its 'what.' Medieval Scholastics named this the 'quiddity' of the tree. The tree as sensed is sensibly known; the quiddity or 'whatness' is unknown, but desired to be known. (139; Fs)

68/5 When the child learns the name of the thing, he or she has a nominal understanding of this sensible experience. Such nominal understanding focuses and illuminates this thing, and also makes it possible for knowers to analogize to other things having somewhat similar and somewhat different shapes, sizes, colors, textures, odors, etc. When a knower moves from a common-sense context of knowing the reality of trees and begins to wonder in a scientific context, the knower desires to know the reality of trees not only descriptively, but in abstraction from its descriptive characteristics; he or she begins to apprehend and judge it in its relations to other organic beings. Thus, the contemporary biologist knows that trees are biochemical and biophysical operators, and that trees are continuously integrating themselves in their environment through a flexible set of recurrent schemes, including such metabolic activities as meiosis and photosynthesis. Scientists tacitly know that, by forming such complex theories, they gradually come to know what trees really are and how they differ and relate to one another. (139; Fs)

69/5 At the heart of such theoretical, cognitional processes is the guiding notion of being that moves scientists to wonder, not only inquisitively, but also critically. They challenge and cross-examine their own thinking because implicitly they know that thinking is not knowing, that thinking is transformed into knowing through judging or verifying. More importantly, they realize that any present verified theory is only a limited explanation of the actual reality of trees. The full and final reality is what biologists know they do not know but want to know, and so their desire to know keeps leading them on to fresh inquiries that repeatedly transcend their present, provisionally verified theories. (139f; Fs)

70/5 Trees are assumed to be fully intelligible realities, and biologists intend to know what those full and final intelligibilities actually are. However, while biologists are aware that they do not know the final reality of trees, they do know something about trees, and what they do know, insofar as it is correctly verified knowing, is what in fact trees actually are. In other words, correct, explanatory knowing of things is not extrinsic to the supposedly inner reality of things; rather, it is through correct knowing that the intrinsic reality of the trees is gradually being disclosed. Correct biological knowing reveals the intrinsic reality of biological things. (140; Fs)

71/5 There is not some further profound, inner reality within trees that philosophers or metaphysicians come to know. Biologists as biologists do not seek to know everything, but they do seek to know what the actual reality or being of trees is, and they are well on their way toward that specialized goal. Being is what all knowers desire to know, and it is what they know in some limited way whenever they know correctly. Being, therefore, is intrinsic to every individual being, but at the same time, it transcends and grounds all that there is to be known. With this notion of being in hand, we are now in a position to raise the epistemological question, namely, the question about the objectivity of our knowing. (140; Fs)