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)