Sublime

an impersonal entity that robs us of the freedom to think for ourselves. To live authentically requires resisting or outwitting this influence, but this is not easy because das Man is so nebulous. Man in German does not mean ‘man’ as in English (that’s der Mann), but a neutral abstraction, something like ‘one’ in the English phrase ‘one doesn’t do

Vier Dimensionen der Verfügbarkeit

But from the standpoint of modern sociology we feel that man is necessarily a social thing, if only for the reason that no individual can come into being without a father and a mother—and this is already society.

I’d like to sketch out this theory of life tasks, which I’ve adapted from the developmental psychologists, especially from scholars like Erik Erikson, the author of “Life Cycle Completed,” and Robert Kegan, author of “The Evolving Self.”

theories of social nn•nuory should he a central part of the sociology of knowledge

These two values simply coexist; they are part of the basic definition of the “reality” of Consciousness II — there is a “public” and a “private” person.

it is not possible to think systematically without writing (Luhmann 1992, 53).