Genuine understanding of a phenomenon requires standing outside it

Evidence

The judgment is the inevitable one that a philosophy of the concrete must pass on the abstract, and it should be added that it is very often precisely from a relatively old-fashioned, anticontemporary, even reactionary viewpoint (see Yvor Winters and, indeed, Edmund Burke himself) that the most penetrating analyses of the actual are made. The advantage of Lukács over sympathetic theoreticians of the modern lies in the differentiating and profoundly comparative thought mode which is his. He is not inside the modern phenomenon, completely given over to its fundamental values, able to see it only through its own eyes: he can define it and mark off its limits as a historical moment from that which it is not; yet such comparisons will always, in their very structure, seem to imply a judgment on the side of the older term. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 399

Categorization

• XREF: The demand to define a historical moment ‘from that which it is not’ is the core totalizing move of Lukács and, via Jameson, the Frankfurt-School method the reader is tracing. — connects to: Self-knowledge of one’s limits requires a vantage point outside them — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 787; Scientific knowledge of the senses remains fully inside the world of objects; Consciousness cannot constitute its object because that object is a full presence outside it — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 148 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Contrast with alien traditions is essential for understanding any phenomenon #exemplifies (0.90)
• Self-knowledge of one’s limits requires a vantage point outside them #expands (0.85) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 787
• Knowledge created from a position of strength produces the object it claims to describe #contradicts (0.80)
• The observing gaze is constituted by being set apart from its object #expands (0.80) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 70
• Scientific knowledge of the senses remains fully inside the world of objects #complicates (0.75)
• Consciousness cannot constitute its object because that object is a full presence outside it #corroborates (0.72) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 148