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)