Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Bewusstsein, doppeltes; Selbsterkenntnis: befragtes Objekt und Fragender zugleich (Beispiel: Elefant); Missverständnis (Grundfehler): Selbsterfahrung als Selbsterkenntnis

Kurzinhalt: ... while there is a difference between knowing self and knowing elephants, the difference is not in the acts of knowing, but in the fact that, in knowing self, you know yourself twice, first as a questioned object and simultaneously ...

Textausschnitt: 48/5 When you are attending to the outer world through your sensory-motor activities, you have a double awareness of yourself. For example, in paying attention to your visual field, you are attentively aware of this outer field, but you are inattentively aware of your seeing and your self. You may shift your attention from the external, sensible data and start paying attention to your interior, conscious field, and when you do, you begin to experience your seeing and yourself as an object of attention. This means you are beginning to appropriate your own activity of seeing and yourself as a seer. When you do that you have a double awareness. You have an attentive awareness of your activity of seeing and of the subject who does the seeing, but the subject seeing is now objectively experienced, while the subject who is doing the attending is only subjectively experienced. In other words, every time you attend to and wonder about your own inner cognitional activities, you are attentively aware of yourself as an object being questioned, and inattentively aware of yourself as the subject who is doing the questioning. This means that in every act of self-appropriation, you generate a further experience or awareness of 'you,' the subject, which can subsequently be attended to and appropriated. (133; Fs)

49/5 There is a difference, then, between knowing elephants and knowing your own subject. In both cases there is an object to be known, but in the case of self-knowing, the object is your own subject. However, while there is a difference between knowing self and knowing elephants, the difference is not in the acts of knowing, but in the fact that, in knowing self, you know yourself twice, first as a questioned object and simultaneously as experienced questioner. In knowing elephants, you know them as an object experienced, questioned, understood, conceived, reflected on, and judged, but at the same time, you are conscious of yourself, the subject, doing these acts of knowing. This latter awareness of self, however, is only an experience of your activities of knowing, and of you, the knower. The recurrent mistake in knowing self, then, is to assume that experience of self, which is an immediate awareness of self, is also a knowing of self. Experiencing of self is only a preliminary, vague, undifferentiated awareness of self that must be mediated by questions, insights, and judgments. Such mediation is what I have referred to as self-appropriation. (133f; Fs)