Es giebt keine Selbstkenntniss als die historische. Niemand weiss was er ist, wer nicht weiss was seine Genossen sind.
“Ideas,” Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), § 139
“Man knows and his capacity to know depends on his biological integrity; furthermore, he knows that he knows. As a basic psychological and, hence, biological function cognition guides his handling of the universe and knowledge gives certainty to his acts; objective knowledge seems possible and through objective knowledge the universe appears systematic and predictable.”
Source: Biology of Cognition (1970), p. 5 Introduction.
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Humberto Maturana 14
Chilean biologist and philosopher 1928Related quotes
Source: De potentia (c. 1265–1266) q. 7, art. 5, ad 14
“In all existential knowledge both subject and object are transformed by the very act of knowing.”
Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 124
Context: There are realms of reality or — more exactly — of abstraction from reality in which the most complete detachment is the adequate cognitive approach. Everything which can be expressed in terms of quantitative measurement has this character. But it is most inadequate to apply the same approach to reality in its infinite concreteness. A self which has become a matter of calculation and management has ceased to be a self. It has become a thing. You must participate in a self in order to know what it is. But by participating you change it. In all existential knowledge both subject and object are transformed by the very act of knowing.
Source: Man's Moral Nature (1879), Ch. 1 : Lines of Cleavage
Source: 1950s, General Systems Theory - The Skeleton of Science, 1956, p. 197