Cognizing and Continuity

 I wrote the following some time ago but am posting it here even though it is kind of boring.   It seems to relate a bit to the last post on continuity.   

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This seems like a pretty fair summary of Dietrich von Hildebrand's What is Philosophy?   The author writes:

[Hildebrand] seeks to investigate the phenomenology of knowing: to consider “what it is like” to know something, and to bring to light the essential structures of this fundamental act.

Since we are all humans, any of us can consider from personal experience "what it is like" to know something.    Hildebrand starts with the act of "taking cognizance of" something.  That formulation sounds like it would read better in German or Greek, but he uses it to describe the initial act of knowledge, before judgment or assertion.    We come to know something by a receptive but not altogether passive process; 

Knowing has an active element, in that there is a mental “going with” the object. This “going with” the object is an intellectual penetration of it. It is a “making common cause” with the object. We find, then, that while it is true that the object discloses itself to the subject, there is an active cooperation on the part of consciousness with the self-disclosure of the object. Knowing is in this sense a mental possessing of the object, an intentional participation in the object’s being.

The reviewer points out that this description of how we come to know, for one thing, resists reductionism; and for another, connects to the topic of empathy, which was a theme of Husserl's and more particularly of fellow Husserl student Edith Stein's .

From the review again:

Taking cognizance of something is predominantly passive, but judging and asserting are more active. A precondition of judging and asserting is a prior act of taking cognizance. The object of an act of judging is a state-of-affairs, i.e. a putative fact. Asserting objectifies knowing (taking cognizance) into a proposition.

This brings me to what I am thinking about -- the relationship between the phenomenology of knowing and its formal art in logic and to some extent in rhetoric and poetry.  In other words, the communication of and/ or development of knowledge.

Even though "what it is like to know" is an experience common to every human, perhaps one of the most basic experiences, discussing it immediately brings the "plain person" into a minefield of terminology, distinctions, portmanteaus and reductions of concepts, and so on.  

But it does not do to get lost in these things.   Hildebrand calls this "superficial thinking".   

We might say that Hildebrand perceives a “snake in the grass” threatening the philosophical project. He places this threat under the rubric of “superficial thinking”. Superficial thinking can be unself-critical, unsystematic, and liable to lose all authentic contact with the object. Hildebrand discusses a variety of possible causes of superficial thinking. Superficial thinking may rely on arguments that one has learned unquestioningly from someone else. It may involve an unjustified generalisation taken from a single perceptual episode. It may involve the unconscious acceptance of premises that are mistakenly presumed to be self-evident. Another mistake is to import a statement from science into philosophy and then treat the statement as metaphysical. An example of this would be claiming that miracles are impossible. The outcome of such lapses is often a prejudicing, impairment, or interruption of the accuracy of attempts at naïve taking cognizance. The superficial thinker’s enquiry fails to penetrate to the concrete givenness of the object.

True philosophically oriented thinking, Hildebrand says

  is always self-critical in the sense of examining its own (a) well-foundedness of premises; (b) stringency of arguments.

It goes wrong when it uncritically imports arguments or premises that are unjustified in some respect (as quoted above).   On the contrary, there can be true prephilosophical reflection:

Theoretical knowledge is knowledge that stems from reflection, over against knowledge that stems from perception. This is to say that in the transition from naïve enquiry to a theoretical attitude, something is gained, namely reflection, but something is also lost, namely proximity to the object. So-called “organic” theoretical knowledge grows “organically” out of episodes of naïve taking cognizance. It is a kind of condensation of episodes of naïve taking cognizance.

Though Hildebrand was not a Thomist, this doesn't seem incompatible with Thomistic theories of knowledge.  At least, not at this point of my understanding.