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.
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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.
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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.
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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?