The First Person Quotes

“It has been held that, since its essential normativity cannot be accommodated within the natural sciences, we might be forced to throw the concept of action and with it action concepts on the trash heap of outdated theories. With action concepts a logical basis of first person thought disappears. Renouncing action concepts is a form of self-annihilation: logical self-annihilation. It annihilates a source of the power to think and say 'I'.”
― Sebastian Rödl, Self-Consciousness

“Yet, the notion that the self-comprehension that is episteme (Wissenschaft) could result from amalgamating a form of episteme from which the first person is expelled with a form of spiritual activity that is incapable of rigorous conceptual articulation is bizarre.”
― Sebastian Rödl, Self-Consciousness and Objectivity: An Introduction to Absolute Idealism

“Die Relativität aller Erkenntnis kann immer nur von außen behauptet werden, solange keine bündige Erkenntnis vollzogen wird. Sobald Bewußtsein in eine bestimmte Sache eintritt und deren immanentem Anspruch auf Wahrheit oder Falschheit sich stellt, zergeht die angeblich subjektive Zufälligkeit des Gedankens. Nichtig aber ist der Relativismus darum, weil, was er einerseits für beliebig und zufällig, andererseits für irreduzibel hält, selbst aus der Objektivität - eben der einer individualistischen Gesellschaft - entspringt.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics