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)