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)