Privacy advances and refines Professor Weiss’s philosophic quest to isolate unmistakable evidences of that which is ultimately real and to trace those evidences to their original sources.
The quest began with the publication of Beyond All Appearances (1974), was expanded and refined into a more defensible formulation by First Considerations (1977), and developed to provide a corresponding, precise, and systematic treatment of man, as apart from and to oppose and interplay with those final realities, in You, I, and the Others (1980). This new work continues his venture as he seeks to isolate evidences of human privacy in the body and the world, to understand what then becomes knowable, and to explore the result.
Weiss demonstrates the inutility of a reductionist methodology when searching for the ultimately real in human beings, stressing that a soundly based nonreductionist method for learning about humanity is built upon the supposition that each person has sure self-knowledge acquired through observation or introspection. By attending to what all people—including oneself—publicly show themselves to be, it becomes possible to extricate evidence of powers present in anyone and thus to learn about the true nature of human privacy. He writes: “To be acquainted with the one is already to be in contact with the other, and in a position to make an intensive, convergent, insistent further move into the sources as not yet expressed.”
Weiss begins his study with an examination of evidences of the human person, and particularly of its most primitive, persistent epitomization, sensitivity. He goes on to examine more and more advanced epitomizations, arriving at and passing beyond the stage where a self comes to be, with its epitomizing assumed accountability, responsibility, and I.
