Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Selbsterkenntnis; Selbstwiderspruch, Syllogismus; Inkonsistenz in der Leugnung eines Selbst; Missverständnis der Unmittelbarkeit; Unterschied zw Bewusstsein und Wissen; Transformation des erfahrenden Selbst in ein wissendes

Kurzinhalt: ... Are you a knower? The question may be expressed in the form of a syllogism: If you are a concrete, understandable unity that experiences, understands, and judges, then you are a knower.

Textausschnitt: 3b Self-Affirmation

50/5 With my analysis of consciousness in place, I now return to the question that I put to the reader, Are you a knower? The question may be expressed in the form of a syllogism: If you are a concrete, understandable unity that experiences, understands, and judges, then you are a knower. The conditioned is the statement: You are a knower, if you are a concrete, intelligible unity who experiences, understands, and judges. The field in which these conditions are to be verified is the data of your own consciousness. Are you conscious of yourself sensing, raising questions, getting insights, formulating them into ideas, questioning the ideas, and judging them? It is important to notice the question is not whether you know something. The question is about the performance of your own cognitional activities.1 This is significant because we do not ordinarily think about knowing as 'doing.' Walking and working are examples of 'doing,' but knowing is assumed to be an internal, mental activity that is often contrasted with external exercise. However, it is important to think of knowing as something that you 'do' because in knowing what you 'do' is your self. Knowing is self-making. (134; Fs)

51/5 There are several other important features of the question, Are you a knower? The question is not. Are you necessarily a knower? It is not. Were you always a knower? Nor is it. Will you always be a knower? Rather, the question asks you to make a concrete judgment of fact, here and now. Most surprising is the fact that you cannot escape the answer. You are, in fact, a knower. The reason is that the activities involved in knowing are not necessarily given; nevertheless, they are given, and given quite spontaneously. Like it or not, if your eyes are open and if you are conscious, then you will see. Spontaneously, questions arise and, while you may prevent certain insights from occurring, insights do occur and, just as naturally and inevitably, questions for judging emerge. You do not have to be a knower; you were not always a knower. But still the events of experiencing, understanding, and judging are given, given consciously, and given in your own presence. You may deny you are a knower, but that places you in a concrete contradiction with yourself, a contradiction between your own actual performance and your account of this performance. You have to use your own knowing in the very process of attempting to deny the fact that you are a knower. It is a fact, and facts are precise, public, and final. In this judgment of fact, you are affirming both your own cognitional activities and you, the unity, who operates and exists in and through this recurring scheme of activities. (134f; Fs)

52/5 It is important to note that you cannot know yourself except in and through these activities. Your immediate awareness of yourself misleads you into thinking that you can know yourself directly and immediately. It is true that you can experience yourself or be aware of yourself directly and immediately, but being aware is not knowing; it is only a preliminary to knowing. Your experience of yourself has to be understood, and this understanding transforms your experienced self into an understood self. This mediation, however, stands in need of yet a further mediation by judging before you can reach a limited judgment about who you are. Thus, you actually use your own knowing to mediate your immediate conscious self. In so doing, you are both the subject 'doing' the knowing and the object who is being mediated and known. As a subject you are immediately experienced, but, as object, you are mediated and known. In self-appropriation or self-knowing, you are revealing your identity to yourself. This knowing of self, as a known object, provides the foundation for a science of epistemology and metaphysics. (135; Fs)