Orientation

Orientation is the achievement of finding one’s way in an unsurveyable and uncertain situation to make out opportunities for actions so that one can successfully master the situation. Orientation is not only essential to human beings, but to animals and some plants as well. It is, like nutrition and breathing, a fundamental, irrefutable, and ineradicable necessity of life.

As it is always dealing with a specific situation, be it private, social, or global, human orientation as a whole is the ability to keep up with the times, i.e. the strength to make decisions in ever-new situations on how things may continue to run successfully – decisions that promise to hold for at least some time until new situations make new orientations necessary.

This makes orientation an achievement of an individual ability: orientations are individual orientations of individual human beings in individual situations. Since every orientation may face unforeseen and surprising circumstances where its abilities might fail, one can never be entirely sure of one’s orientation. A philosophical analysis of orientation needs to take into consideration all of these aspects. Since orientation may altogether involve surprising structures, the leeway of its analysis should not be limited too much beforehand and one should be as cautious as possible not to make premature philosophical decisions (chap 1.1).

XI-XIV, 1-3, 5-6, 15-23

 

Glossary

Reinhard Mueller