"We don't have a 'scissors in the mind' that can trim away dissonance at will, in an effort to isolate our knowledge in actu from uncomfortable aspects of our knowledge of the world."
— Habermas, Jürgen (b. 1929)
Author
Date
March, 2007
Metaphor
"We don't have a 'scissors in the mind' that can trim away dissonance at will, in an effort to isolate our knowledge in actu from uncomfortable aspects of our knowledge of the world."
Metaphor in Context
In everyday life, we must assume that our knowledge in actu--the know-how by which we are guided in the course of our performance—does not conflict with anything we know about the world. This 'must' expresses a conceptual link: we cannot suppress at will what we have 'learned' or what we think we 'know.' Unlearning and forgetting happen but they cannot be goals that we strive for. We don't have a 'scissors in the mind' that can trim away dissonance at will, in an effort to isolate our knowledge in actu from uncomfortable aspects of our knowledge of the world. The epistemic subject does not simply encounter the world but also knows itself to be one entity among others in the world. That is why knowledge of the world bites back at the knowing agent. The cumulative expansion of our knowledge of the world cannot leave untouched the position that epistemic subjects have to attribute to themselves as subjects who also act in the world. This explains, incidentally, the internal connection between science and enlightenment: 'Enlightenment is not so much scientific progress as the loss of naïveté.' We associate the names of Newton and Darwin with advances in knowledge, which have propelled an ongoing decentering of our self-understanding; they represent shifts that relativize the place of humankind in the world but that are also experienced as shifts towards disillusionment and liberation.
(pp. 23-4)
(pp. 23-4)
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Habermas, Jürgen, "The Language Game of Responsible Agency and the Problem of Free Will: How Can Epistemic Dualism be Reconciled with Ontological Monism?" Philosophical Explorations 10:1 (March 2007): 13-50.
Date of Entry
04/15/2013
