Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Einführung, Insight, Wojtyla, Rogers, Empirismus, Materialismus, Konversion

Kurzinhalt: Insight, invariantes Muster, Lonergan - Gefühl, Langer, Empirismus - Lonergan, Rest-Materialismus, Newman, intellektuelle Konversion; Welt: Unmittelbarkeit, Bedeutung, distinctio, Sein - Wesen

Textausschnitt: () ... I began to make something of it, but in the end it opened up a whole new world to me. It showed me a new approach to reality, and made me aware of questions I had only dimly perceived.
()
Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you will possess a fixed base, an invariant pattern, opening upon all further developments of understanding.
()
And I doubted he could do it. His work appeared so patently intellectual and all my leanings - and the leanings of the culture around me - were 'experiential.' By that term I understood chiefly the in's and out's of human feelings.
()
It was that residual materialism that was at the basis of much conflict and division in the Church as well as in the world at large.
()
Fußnote: John Henry Newman, A Grammar of Assent ... In spite of oppositions and conflicts among people on matters philosophical, ethical, and religious, still a serious inquirer 'brings together his reasons and relies on them, because they are his own, and this is his primary evidence; and he has a second ground of evidence, in the testimony of those who agree with him. ...
()
Intellectual conversion is a radical clarification and, consequently, the elimination of an exceedingly stubborn and misleading myth concerning reality, objectivity, and knowledge. The myth is that knowing is like looking, that objectivity is seeing what is there to be seen and not seeing what is not there, and that the real is out there now to be looked at.
()
In Insight Lonergan speaks of the 'startling strangeness' one experiences as one makes the breakthrough from the residual materialism of naive realism, to the 'critical realism' of thinking about our minds on their own terms. It is a breakthrough to a whole new world. It is a discovery that one has not yet made 'if one has no clear memory of its startling strangeness.
()
... that there are two quite different realisms, that there is an incoherent realism half animal and half human, that poses as a halfway house between materialism and idealism, and on the other hand that there is an intelligent and reasonable realism between which and materialism the half-way house is idealism.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Lonergan, Gotteserfahrung, Mystik

Kurzinhalt: Lonergan: Beschreibung seiner Gotteserfahrung

Textausschnitt: () ... the experience of 'falling in love' and 'being in love' with God: 'It is as though the room were filled with music though one can have no sure knowledge of its source.
()
You can be a mystic and not know it.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Suarez, distinctio realis, Sein, Wesenheit, Konversion

Kurzinhalt: According to Suarez, existence is nothing else but the actual essence itself, a 'mode' of essential being

Textausschnitt: 1/1 "Characteristic of his generation, Lonergan did not speak easily of his own spiritual life. Later on he noted that in his early training there was a great fear of illusion in the spiritual life and great hesitancy to speak of mystical experience. Years later he would frequently speak and write of the experience of 'falling in love' and 'being in love' with God: 'It is as though the room were filled with music though one can have no sure knowledge of its source. There is in the world, as it were, a charged field of love and meaning; here and there it reaches a notable intensity; but it is ever unobtrusive, hidden, inviting each of us to join. And join we must if we are to perceive it, for our perceiving is through our own loving.'1 Still, this experience is mysterious. It need not be the focal point of attention. As Lonergan once remarked, 'You can be a mystic and not know it.'2" (7)

2/1 "Among the emphases of Suarez'3 thought was his denial of the 'real distinction' between the essence of a thing and its existence, a thesis other Thomists tended to defend. According to Suarez, existence is nothing else but the actual essence itself, a 'mode' of essential being. This issue became a central bone of contention among twentieth century Thomists and was in fact central to what Lonergan later called his own 'intellectual conversion.'4 (10f; Fs)

3/1 Suarez' thought did not lack influence. Diverse Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers had been influenced by him: Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Wolff, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Vico - among others. In fact, when many modern continental thinkers thought of scholastic thought, they were often thinking of Suarezian scholasticism. Perhaps because of this interpenetration by continental thought, German Jesuits had also been greatly influenced by Suarez. Among these were a number who were influential in Rome in the latter nineteenth century. Johannes Baptist Franzelin was a Suarezian Thomist who was the central theological influence on the decrees of Vatican I. A fellow Jesuit, Joseph Kleutgen, exercised the major influence on Leo's writing of Aeterni Patris. (11; Fs)
4/1 A typical Suarezian textbook that Lonergan would have been exposed to at Heythrop was written in Latin by the Jesuit, J. Urraburu ..." (11)

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Newman, Leben, Leo XIII

Kurzinhalt: Newman, Lebensziel, Widerstand gegen: Rationalismus, Skeptizismus

Textausschnitt: () ... he summarized the major thrust of his life's work as a resistance to 'the spirit of liberalism in religion' which he defined as, 'the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Newman, Rationalismus, Kirchenväter

Kurzinhalt: Newman über Rationalismus; Origenes, Clemens: "wie Musik für mein inneres Ohr"

Textausschnitt: () 'Rationalism is a certain abuse of Reason; that is, a use of it for purposes for which it never was intended, and is unfitted. To rationalize in matters of Revelation is to make our reason the standard and measure of the doctrine revealed. [...] It is Rationalism to accept Revelation and then to explain it away; to speak of it as the Word of God, and to treat it as the word of man; to refuse to let it speak for itself. [...]. The Rationalist makes himself his own center, not his Maker; he does not go to God, but implies that God must come to him. [...] Rationalism takes the words of Scripture as signs of Ideas; Faith of Things or Realities.' Essays Critical and Historical ...
()
'The broad philosophy of Clement and Origen carried me away; the philosophy, not the theological doctrine. [...] Some portions of their teaching, magnificent in themselves, came like music to my inward ear, as if in response to ideas, which, with little external to encourage them, I had cherished so long.' Elsewhere in the Apologia Newman mentions his own early temperament as being attracted to the world of the unseen, leading him to 'rest in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator.'

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Newman, Lonergan, Grammar, Logik

Kurzinhalt: Grammar of Assent, Lonergan über Newman, Aristoteles, Newmans letzte Instanz des Wissens, egotism - modesty, Newmans Methode, Durchbruch (alps), Gewissheit - Zustimmung

Textausschnitt: () As Lonergan articulated one of his major debts to Newman: 'Newman's remark that ten thousand difficulties do not make a doubt has served me in good stead. It encouraged me to look difficulties squarely in the eye, while not letting them interfere with my vocation or my faith.'
()
For Newman the core issue in the Grammar of Assent was the nature of the human mind. What does it mean to know?
()
For Newman the ultimate court of appeal for the knowledge of human mentality would be the mind's own knowledge of itself. As he trenchantly expressed it, 'in these provinces of inquiry egotism is true modesty.'
() For Newman the ultimate court of appeal for the knowledge of human mentality would be the mind's own knowledge of itself. As he trenchantly expressed it, 'in these provinces of inquiry egotism is true modesty.' ... The following words must have rung a bell for the young Lonergan who was beginning to 'think for himself':
()
In spite of oppositions and conflicts among people on matters philosophical, ethical, and religious, still a serious inquirer, 'brings together his reasons and relies on them, because they are his own, and this is his primary evidence; and he has a second ground of evidence, in the testimony of those who agree with him. But his best evidence is the former, which is derived from his own thoughts; and it is that ...
()
... it struck me 'You are wrong in beginning with certitude - certitude is only a kind of assent - you should begin with contrasting assent and inference.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Newman, Lonergan, Mathematik, Gewissheit

Kurzinhalt: Gewissheit -> Mathematik; Problem: Einzelnes - Allgemeines; Nominalismus, Induktion - Konzeptualismus, vis cogitativa, Erfassung des Allgemeinen im Einzelnen; Allgemeines - doch nicht abstrakt)

Textausschnitt: Lonergan's concern is the specific question of what in fact happens when we draw mathematical conclusions.
()
Both axioms and inferences are 'intuited' in the concrete.
()
The truth of the particular is not a consequence of the truth of the general; rather, the general is grasped in the particular.
()
Newman says: 'There is a universal which is not abstract, and an abstract which is not universal.
FN: 'The question is whether a universal is merely formed by induction from particulars. A Nominalist must reply in the affirmative. Newman replies in the negative. In principle a universal can be formed from one particular.'

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Lonergan, Syllogismus, Logik

Kurzinhalt: Konditionalaussagen, hypothetischer Syllogismus, Gründung der Logik in der Seinsordnung, Lonergan: gegen Konzeptualismus

Textausschnitt: ()
If A, then B
But A
Therefore B.
()
'The cause of the attribute belonging to the object in the real order, is the reason why the mind attributes the predicate to the subject in the act of inference.'

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Newman, Wahrheit, Urteil, Wissenschaft, Grundvertrauen

Kurzinhalt: Wahres Urteil, Lonergan über "illative sense" (Folgerungssinn), Tibet, Vertrauen vs. Zweifel

Textausschnitt: () The illative sense is just such an absolute verification. The mind in a given case may be able to determine the limit of converging probabilities, and so disregard as nugatory the nebulous possibilities which prevent an inference from being logically valid. ... Thus we know the truth and know we know it but prove it we cannot.
() ... Tibet ... Such ordinary judgments are rational, and can be certain, but they are not reducible to the rationality of deduction from self-evident principles.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Newman, Lonergan, apprehension, assent, Erfassung, Zustimmung

Kurzinhalt: real, notional apprehension (Erfassung), Erfassung - Zustimmung

Textausschnitt: () Real apprehension may be described as impressional, that of one who enters onto the object by sympathy, intuition, unformulated interpretations, while notional apprehension stands over against the object, successively views its relations, analyses, formulates.
()
Lonergan refers to Newman's assertion that in notional apprehension we regard things not as they are in themselves, but mainly as they stand in relation to each other. On the other hand, real apprehension is concerned, not primarily with ideas, 'the aspects of things,' but with things themselves of which we have an 'impressional' apprehension.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Newman, Lonergan, Objektivität

Kurzinhalt: Objektivität ohne Selbst-Transzendenz -> Illusion

Textausschnitt: () Ojectivity is reached through the self-transcendence of the concrete existing subject, and the fundamental forms of self-transcendence are intellectual, moral and religious conversion. To attempt to ensure objectivity apart from self-transcendence only generates illusion.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Lonergan, Nominalismus, Newman, Abstraktion, Scholastik

Kurzinhalt: William of Ockham, Hobbes, Hume, Mill, Przywara ; Allgemeines - Einzelnen: Konzeptualismus, Realismus, Nominalismus; Abstraktion d. Scholastik

Textausschnitt: () Ockham's thesis was that, since only individual things really exist, universal concepts are only names (flatus vocis) used to speak of individual things. Traditionally opposed to nominalism were various types of scholastic 'realism' which vindicated the realistic character of universal concepts, and indeed, tended to build a whole philosophy around the importance of such concepts.
()
there are three main philosophical schools in relation to 'the controversy on universals.' He asks, what is this 'human nature' which is one and yet stands in the same relation to every member of the class - which though it is one, belongs at the same time to many members?
()
... a 'Moderate Realism' which maintains that the mind abstracts from things concepts of their natures and it is those natures which are truly found in all the individuals of a class. Opposed to such moderate realism is the 'Exaggerated Realism' of a Plato ...

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Newman, Konversion, Katholizismus

Kurzinhalt: Das Licht, das Newman auf den richtigen Weg brachte

Textausschnitt: () Newman was intellectually satisfied of the truth of Catholicism; he did not yet assent; he feared that this light of his intellect was a false light that had come upon him in punishment for his sins; he did not assent but he prayed. The kindly light had indeed led him on, led him where he never expected to be brought; it led him to an extremity that terrified him; he wrestled, as Jacob with the angel.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Lonergan, Stewart, Plato, Meno, Erfahrung, Idee, Formel

Kurzinhalt: Lonergan; Platos Ideen als Kategorienu. Produkt der Tätigkeit des Geistes, Kant, Plato als Methodologe; Wurzel d. Idee im sensibile, Dynamik der Erkenntnis: sensibile -> intelligibile

Textausschnitt: () Stewart felt that many commentators had missed Plato's point in his theory of Ideas because they had not asked the basic question: what human and psychological experience was Plato talking about? They had tended to make Plato's ideas seem fantastic because they had not related them to the facts of present human psychology. Only in this way could the origins of his Plato's theory be discovered.
()
If we dismiss from our minds the prejudice raised by Aristotle's criticism, we find nothing in the Dialogues of Plato to countenance the view that the Ideas, so far as they have methodological significance, are 'known' as statically existent: they are 'known' only as dynamically existent - only as performing their function of making sensibilia intelligible. It is as true of Kant's categories that without sense they are empty. The Ideas, so far as their methodological significance is concerned, are nothing more than concepts-in-use ...
()
The eidos is not an impression of sense passively received; it is a product of the mind's activity, an instrument constructed by the mind whereby it 'makes nature,' 'moulds environment,' so as to serve the purposes of human life.
()
from Stewart I learnt that Plato was a methodologist, that his ideas were what the scientist seeks to discover, that the scientific or philosophic process towards discovery was one of question and answer.
()
Concepts then are rooted in 'grasping the intelligible in the sensible,' as Lonergan would later put it. Stewart found this in Plato:
()
the dynamism of the intellectual search for the unknown. In between the concepts, on the one hand, and the sensible data on the other, there is the pre-conceptual dynamism of questioning and understanding.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Lonergan, Voegelin, Höhlengleichnis

Kurzinhalt: Lonergan über Voegelin

Textausschnitt: () On the one hand, opinion may lead through reason (logos) to the best (ariston), and its power is called self-restraint (sophrosyne); on the other hand, desire may drag us (helkein) towards pleasures and its rule is called excess (hybris). Or as Voegelin illustrates the matter, a young man may be drawn to philosophy but by social pressure be diverted to a life of pleasure or to success in politics. But if he follows the second pull, the meaning of his life is not settled for him. The first pull remains and is still experienced as part of his living. Following the second pull does not transform his being into a question-free fact, but into a questionable course. He will sense that the life he leads is not his 'own and true life.'
()
FN zu Kap.23/3: ... on Voegelin: 'He is a moral man, and he certainly presents conscience, using Plato to do it - in The Laws, the puppeteer. The pull of the golden cord doesn't force you; you have to agree, make the decision. But the jerk of the steel chain, that's what upsets you. The viewpoint is Ignatius and it is the whole ascetic tradition of the discernment of spirits.'

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Augustinus, Cassiciacum, Fragen

Kurzinhalt: Augustin: frühe Dialoge; Fragen des 30-jährigen; Neuplatonismus, De Beata Vita, Hortensius,

Textausschnitt: () What is the good life? Does it consist in great possessions? But do not great possessions bring the fear of their own loss? Is 'wisdom' the way to a happy life? a wisdom in which the lower levels of the human person are subordinated to the human mind? (De Beata Vita) [...] Does wisdom consist in knowing the truth or only in seeking the truth? Can any truth be known with certitude? Is there the Truth that can enlighten us about what is truth? How come to a vision of such Truth? (Contra Academicos) [...] If God is good, how account for evil? Does evil, like the jagged edges of a single stone in a mosaic, fit into some larger plan, some larger order in the universe?
()
... in these dialogues Augustine is obviously trying to set his convictions into some kind of intelligible framework. Afraid perhaps of being carried away with the emotion of the moment, he is trying to consolidate the fruits of his conversion in rational terms.
()
1) Conversion from corporeal thinking;
2) Refutation of skepticism;
3) Faith and understanding;
4) Veritas: from truths to the Truth.
()
What the Hortensius represented for Augustine, as he beautifully recounts in the Confessions, was that it inspired in him a disinterested search for the truth, a desire that remained beneath the surface of his life throughout all the years of his moral and philosophical wandering:

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Augustin, Cassiciacum, Manichäer, Meinung

Kurzinhalt: Manichäer, Lehre, Dualismus, Bilder-Denken, körperhaftes Denken, Augustin - Welt d. Meinung (Newman, Lonergan),

Textausschnitt: () Augustine rejected the religion of the Manichees in 383 when he realized the unintelligible nature of these myths and was very unimpressed with the philosophic understanding of the Manichee leaders.
()
According to the Confessions, the chief intellectual obstacle in Augustine's journey to Christianity ... was his need to imaginatively 'picture' things which cannot strictly speaking be pictured, whether those things be God or even his own conscious self.
()
Slowly Augustine began to believe in the reality of the unseen (what Lonergan later spoke of as the world 'mediated by meaning' ... ... Most strongly of all it struck me how firmly and unshakeably I believed that I was born of a particular father and mother, which I could not possibly know unless I believed it on the word of others

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Augustin, Cassiciacum, Skeptizismus, Akademiker, Unsterblichkeit, Seele

Kurzinhalt: Überwindung d. Skeptizismus, Inkonsistenz d. Skeptiker, Zweifel (Descartes), Dialog mit d. Vernunft, Selbstgewissheit des Denkens; Selbstevidenz d. Verstehens, sicherer als d. Wissen um Zahlen

Textausschnitt: () ... the truly wise person will refuse to give assent to anything; for the wise person merely seeks the truth. Lest this lead to a paralysis of action, the skeptics held that some things resemble the truth, that is, they are probable, and probability is a sufficient basis for action in this world.
()
'Everyone who knows that he has doubts knows with certainty something that is true, namely, that he doubts. He is certain, therefore, about a truth. Therefore everyone who doubts whether there be such a thing as the truth has at least a truth to set a limit to his doubt; and nothing can be true except truth be in it. Accordingly, no one ought to have doubts about the existence of the truth, even if doubts arise for him from every quarter.
()
Centuries later Bernard Lonergan would pay tribute to Augustine's basic methodology: 'For Augustine, the mind's self-knowledge was basic; it was the rock of certitude on which shattered Academic doubt; it provided the ground from which one could argue to the validity both of the senses of one's own body and, with the mediation of testimony, of the senses of the bodies of others.'
()
: first, the human subject inevitably knows that he exists; and secondly, he knows that he thinks. Augustine brings out the immediacy of the 'knowledge' that the concrete subject has of himself as existing and acting through the very fact that he thinks.
()
In this work Augustine aims at proving the existence of God by beginning with the first evidences of the human spirit: one's personal existence, about which one cannot be mistaken, because existence is the first condition of the possibility of error itself. Also, since the existence of his interlocutor, Evodius, is evident through the fact that he actually lives, his living is also at the same time evident. The two facts are evidently true. The interlocutor clearly understands them. Therefore, Augustine moves to a third fact, the fact of understanding.
()
I now say to both of you: Beware lest you think that you know anything except what you have learned at least in the manner in which you know that one plus two plus three plus four is ten. And, likewise, beware lest you think either that in philosophy you will not gain a thorough knowledge of the truth, or that truth can by no means become known in this manner. Believe me - or rather, believe Him who says: 'Seek, and you shall find' - that knowledge is not to be despaired of, but that it will be even more manifest than those of numbers (CA 2, 9).

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Augustinus, Thomas, Lonergan, Dinge, Sinnenwelt, Geist, Konversion

Kurzinhalt: Augustinus, Thomas, Lonergan: Unermüdlichkeit der Konversion vom Sinnenwesen zum Geistwesen

Textausschnitt: () Now, for acquiring this self-knowledge, he needs a constant habit of withdrawing from things of the senses and of concentrating his thought within himself, and holding it there.
()
He is speaking of the importance of moving from 'our own little worlds' to the universe of being grasped by true judgment. This move requires a constant correction of our own private worlds. However, Lonergan notes, quoting Thomas Aquinas: 'I am inclined to believe [...] that this constant and sedulous correction does not occur without a specifically philosophic conversion from the homo sensibilibus immersus to homo maxime est mens hominis.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: intelligere, Vernunft, Augustin, Thomas, Sonne, Lonergan

Kurzinhalt: Vernunft als: adspectus, ratiocinatio, intellectus; Thomas: intelligibile in actu est intellectus in actu; Wahrheit (truth) als Wort Gottes; Sonne - Gott; Christus als Wahrheit Gottes

Textausschnitt: ()
Ipsa autem visio, intellectus est ille qui in anima est, qui conficitur ex intelligente et eo quod intelligitur; ut in oculis videre quod dicitur, ex eo sensu constat atque sensibile, quorum detracto quolibet, videri nihil potest.
However, this vision itself is the understanding which is in the soul, brought forth by the one who understands and that which is understood: just as in the eyes, what is called 'seeing' consists of the sense itself and the thing sensed, either of which being withdrawn, nothing can be seen (SOL 1, 6, 13).
()
sensibile in actu est sensus in actu, et intelligibile in actu est intellectus in actu
()
This principle itself is opposed to the empiricist myth of the confrontation of the 'blooming buzzing confusion' of sense data over against the sensing organ. On the contrary, sensation already structures and patterns its object in the very act of sensing. Intellect is primarily one with its object prior to sorting out the complexities of objectivity and subjectivity.
()
... just as in this sun one may remark three certain things, namely, that it is, that it shines, and that it illumines, so also in that most hidden God whom you wish to know there are three things, namely, that He is, that He is known, and that He makes other things to be known
()
Concerning universals of which we can have knowledge, we do not listen to anyone speaking and making sounds outside ourselves. We listen to Truth which presides over our minds within us, though of course we may be bidden to listen by someone using words. Our real Teacher is he who is so listened to, who is said to dwell in the inner man, namely Christ, that is, the unchangeable power and eternal wisdom of God

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Augustinus, Lonergan, Zusammenfassung

Kurzinhalt: Kraft des transzendentalen Apriori; Sünde; Wissensstreben; Reste des Empirismus bei Augustin; Thomas - Augustinus,

Textausschnitt: () ... it is not difficult to see how they prepared the way for Bernard Lonergan's own intellectual conversion. There is Augustine's honest desire for the truth ...
()
There is the transcendental a priori of Truth - veritas - that enables us to come to know any truth.
()
Augustine had a profound sense of the moral and religious implications of the pure desire to know. He knew the destructive force of human desires and their deleterious effect on human imagination and, consequently, human thought. As the years went on he would come to a greater awareness of the 'reign of sin' that plunged human society into darkness and the absolute need for the liberating grace of Christ.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Substanz, Hume, Kant, Lonergan

Kurzinhalt: Substanz als Scheidepunkt zw. kritischer und dogmatischer Philosophie; "Abstraktion"

Textausschnitt: () Consequently, Lonergan goes on to say, 'the idea of substance has become the trial case, the 'experimentum crucis,' between the dogmatic and the critical schools.'
()
'For if understanding is ultimately apprehensive, then 'substance,' what lies beneath or stands beneath the appearances, must be had by apprehension: this is the scholastic position. On the critical theory, the substance is known by an immanent activity and so is not apprehended but merely understood to be there; clearly this corresponds exactly with our knowledge of substance: we do not know what it is - as we would if we ever apprehended it; all we know is that it is there.'

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Kant, Grundirrtum, Lonergan, Urteil, synthetisch, spiritual apprehension

Kurzinhalt: Kants Grundfehler = naiver Realismus der Scholastik; apprehension; ästhetische, intellektuelle Freude, synthetische Urteile a priori,

Textausschnitt: () 'Kant suffered from the obsession that the only possible justification was some sort of spiritual apprehension of the thing-in-itself - a presentation and not a mere understanding of the object. Since such a presentation was not to be had ...
()
In other words, Kant's basic error was the same as that of the naive realism of the scholastics: an understanding of understanding as some kind of 'spiritual apprehension of the thing-in-itself.'
()
Just as aesthetic pleasure accompanies apprehension and is preceded by curiosity, so understanding is preceded by wonder and is accompanied by its own peculiar subjective satisfaction.
()
Lonergan examines the Kantian synthetic a priori judgments. What is the source of the judgment that every contingent being must have a cause? Why must every contingent being have a cause? Precisely because otherwise its existence could not be understood; it would have no sufficient reason for its existence. It seems that the principle of sufficient reason is utterly central to Lonergan's thought at this point.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Substanz, Akzidenz, distinctio realis, Sein, Wesen; "kausale" Erklärung d. Substanz, Unterschied: Intelligibilität - Existenz

Kurzinhalt: ... there is no real distinction between substance and accidents as the scholastic theory requires ... Lonergan distinguishes the intelligibility of the object from the fact that the object exists

Textausschnitt: 13/5 Unlike Kantian theory in which the apprehension of the object is according to the formal category of substance, Lonergan's analysis is 'not formal but causal.' (80; Fs)

The substance therefore is not only what unifies the different appearances of the object and makes it ens per se, a thing by itself distinct from other things; it is also the cause of the appearances. In other words, the appearances are the substance manifested to us sensibly. Hence there is no real distinction between the substance and the appearances; that is, there is no real distinction between substance and accidents as the scholastic theory requires. For example, the white of the object is not something objectively different from the object itself; white is what the object appears to be to the eye.1 [...] Again, not only is the substance the cause of the appearances but also it is the explanation of its action and reaction [...]. We may remark that being the explanation of action includes being the explanation or cause of sensation (in so far as sensation is caused by the object perceived and not by the subject perceiving).2

14/5 The action and reaction of the substance is according to intelligible law and this follows from the intelligibility of reality. Such intelligible law is progressively discovered by developing human intelligence. (80; Fs)

15/5 It is remarkable in these notes that there is a section prefiguring Lonergan's program in Insight, that is, a program of unifying all the sciences in a 'science of sciences' based on developing understanding. 'In so far as the critical metaphysic is a view or theory of reality, it is more pronouncedly positive and inductive; it takes advantage of all human understanding or science of the objective world and is, in the theoretic order, a science of sciences [...]. Critical metaphysic takes the explanations arrived at in every field of science - physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, history, ethics, etc. - and frames a unified view of reality in its totality.'3 Lonergan distinguishes the intelligibility of the object from the fact that the object exists and thus touches on the scholastic doctrine of the real distinction of essence and existence. (80f; Fs)

The law of the object is distinct from the fact that the object exists. This distinctness is due to the nature of our knowledge. For the fact of existence is known by apprehension; the law of the object is known by understanding. Knowledge consists of a conjunction of presentation and understanding into one whole; the pure presentation of experience and the pure intellection (abstract idea) are the entia quibus of knowledge (human). This distinction the scholastic theory objectifies by a real distinction between essence and existence; it puts the composition, not in the mind, but in some very obscure way, in the object. Whether the critical metaphysician will assert such a real distinction or not, I shall discuss presently. But if he does, it will not be due to the distinction in the mind but only on the analogy of this distinction and as a theory to explain definite facts.4

16/5 These written fragments by Lonergan contain no further comments on the 'real distinction,' but since he had already denied the scholastic theory of the real distinction between substance and accident, and since he is at the very least ambiguous in his attitude toward it in the above quote, it is safe to say that at this time it is not a doctrine on which he has convictions. (81; Fs)

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Identität: Sein, Denken; Hegel, Feuerbach, Lonergan; Definition: Gewissheit; Mystik

Kurzinhalt: The sole explanation is that there is an ultimate identity of intelligence and reality; i.e., that in virtue of which other things are must be not only a cause but also an intelligence.'3 He specifies the meaning of this identity of intelligence and ...

Textausschnitt: 17/5 There is then the critical problem: 'What justification is there for the subject's demand to understand? Why may we suppose that evidence, a subjective experience, the illumination that comes of having things explained, should be an ear-mark of truth, that is, of the way things-in-themselves (so distinct from our minds) should be explained?'1 Lonergan pays tribute to Hegel. (81; Fs)

Hegel indicated the germ of a solution by positing an identity of intelligence and reality. His interest in theory made him give the upper hand in this identity to intelligence; for him the world is the idea gaining consciousness of itself and unfolding itself according to thesis, antithesis and higher synthesis. This is all very nice for the theoretical side of things, however misty, but what happens to the practical? Feuerbach solved this by turning Hegel's house upside down. He asserted the identity of intelligence and reality but gave the upper hand to reality, in particular material reality.2

18/5 At this point Lonergan inserts a handwritten note about Marx's dialectical materialism necessitating Communism and the unity of theory and practice as the basis of Bolshevism. It is obvious that his interest in philosophy goes hand-in-hand with his interest in the contemporary historical situation. He indicates his own position. 'The intelligibility of reality itself needs an explanation. The sole explanation is that there is an ultimate identity of intelligence and reality; i.e., that in virtue of which other things are must be not only a cause but also an intelligence.'3 He specifies the meaning of this identity of intelligence and reality: (82; Fs)

Now, though an identity of intelligence and reality is the solution, it does not follow that this identity need be verified in the actual world. A radical and fundamental identity is quite sufficient, the theist as opposed to the monist position. This sets up a pre-established harmony (I do not mean a psycho-physical parallelism) which makes the intellect of man apt to understand the right way, and so justifies the demand of the subject to understand, [and] gives a sufficient reason for the axiom 'ens et intelligibile convertuntur.'4

19/5 Referring to Newman, Lonergan then defines certitude: 'Certitude is therefore an assent to an idea, to a theory, as the sole possible explanation of the facts.'5 (82; Fs)

20/5 In a further page of these written fragments, Lonergan links this theory of 'intellect as immanent act' with mystical experience. 'The theory of intellection as immanent act fits in with a philosophy of mysticism; the mystical experience is sui generis because it is an experience, a transcendence, of the soul as soul and not merely as related to the body. The uniqueness of this experience is more readily understood, if our theory of ordinary knowledge does not postulate spiritual apprehensions,'6 At the same time, as in his early Blandyke Papers, there is in these notes an emphasis on the need for experience, imagination, the presentation, in order to understand.' [...] We have here an explanation of the need of phantasm, of diagrams in geometry, of experiments in physics. Parallel to this is the need of illustration in oratory and exposition, of the importance of similitude, parable, analogy in gaining ideas of things unseen. The last brings us to the most profound example of the idea in the concrete, the Incarnation; in the words of St. John: kai ho logos sarx egeneto.'7 (82f; Fs)

21/5 The ultimate aim of Lonergan's critical metaphysics is to consider human life, not only in its metaphysical character, but as it really is lived, with weakness but also tending toward a transcendent telos. As he quotes Augustine: Fecisti nos ad te, Domine, et inquietum cor nostrum donec requiescat in te. (83; Fs)

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Lonergan, Fragmente, Entwicklung

Kurzinhalt: Lonergan d. frühen Fragmente; Ablehnung der spiritual "apprehension"; Mangel: distinctio realis (Substanz - Akzidenz); räumliche Kategorien

Textausschnitt: () His basic point in these notes is the absolutely unique character of the act of understanding and the radical identity of intellect and reality. It is obvious that he is on to something; and he knows he is. On the other hand, these notes are ambiguous about the sharp distinction he will later make between understanding and judgment.
()
This underlying lack of clarity about the ultimate criterion of reality is also revealed in Lonergan's denial of the scholastic 'real distinction' between substance and accident, as well as his down-playing, if not denying, the real distinction between essence and existence. This latter issue will be at the core of his intellectual conversion.
()
... that between a materialism and a critical realism 'the halfway house is idealism.' He is on the way to a critical realism.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Konversion, Rahner, Lonergan, Methode, Fortschritt, Niedergang, Trost

Kurzinhalt: Method in Theology: intellektuelle, moralische, religiöse Konversion, Relation; Entfremdung; intell. K. -> wichtig für moralische K. (Krise); progress - decline, Plato, Aristoteles, der unbekannte Gott

Textausschnitt: () Moral conversion is the radical change in the criterion of one's decisions and choices from satisfactions to values. It involves the thrust of our human freedom toward authenticity. Finally, religious conversion is 'being grasped by an other-worldly love.' It is total and permanent self-surrender without conditions, qualifications, reservations.
()
In a world in which alienation and ideology reign, intellectual conversion is extremely important for the social and cultural effectiveness of moral conversion. () We have to learn to distinguish sharply between progress and decline, learn to encourage progress without putting a premium upon decline, learn to remove the tumor of the flight from understanding without destroying the organs of intelligence.'
()
Similarly, religious conversion goes beyond moral and intellectual conversion. In itself, it is an other-worldly falling in love that brings a joy that this world cannot give. At the same time it introduces a new orientation into intellectual and moral living. ... 'In no way are the fruits of intellectual and moral conversion negated or diminished. On the contrary, all human pursuit of the true and the good is included within and furthered by a cosmic context and purpose and, as well, there now accrues to man the power of love to enable him to accept the suffering involved in undoing the effects of decline.'
()
... people today do not know about the unknown god. You have to open up their minds, let them find out what their own minds are before they can begin to be open to thinking of anything beyond this world.
()
We go through all this rigmarole of science, common sense and all the rest of it to help people find out what they have underneath their skulls - only it isn't underneath. Anything else?

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Konversion, Geschichte, Insight, Metaphysik

Kurzinhalt: Mangel an intellektueller Konversion, menschl. Situation, Vorurteil (bias), Bedingungen d. Kommunikation,

Textausschnitt: () Without personal intellectual conversion these writings cannot properly be understood.
()
Without the continuing influence of that metaphysical vision, the conditions for genuine communication disappear.
()
In various ways through the years Lonergan identified the absence of intellectual conversion as one of the causes of the lack of human communication:
()
The real menace to unity of faith does not lie either in the many brands of common sense or the many differentiations of human consciousness. It lies in the absence of intellectual or moral or religious conversion.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Lonergan, Liddy, Langer, Augustinus

Kurzinhalt: Langer - Lonergan, Liddys Erfahrung u. Erkenntnis, Idealismus -> Realismus, intellektuelle Konversion,

Textausschnitt: () What if every conscious act was reducible to imagination? I was not sure what insight was like. I was not sure I could situate it clearly in my own consciousness. I was not sure I 'had' it. (Students of Lonergan's thought regularly go through this period of insecurity, of oscillating back and forth between imagined possibilities. Where does this insecurity come from?)
()
I remember saying something to myself like: 'Where is this act of insight?' And then it occurred to me: (206; Fs)
You're asking the wrong question!
Look at the question you're asking! You're asking a question that can't be answered! Asking 'where' is an attempt to visualize what can't be visualized. You're attempting to imagine what of its nature goes beyond imagination - that is, insight!
Indeed, you can be aware of the act of insight, understand it in its relationships with other cognitional acts, come to judge that understanding correct, but you can't see it! The very question you were asking was formulated in imaginative and visual terms and, as such, can't be answered.
()
Confessions: (206; Fs)
My mind was in search of such images as the forms of my eye was accustomed to see; and I did not realize that the mental act by which I formed these images was not itself a bodily image (Confessions 7, 1).
()
Intellectual conversion is rooted in the intellectual breakthroughs most of us have had throughout our years of education. But the full meaning of intellectual conversion is the full and conscious appropriation of our intellectual being, and indeed, our intellectual being in relation to the rest of our being - and to the universe. What I was implicitly looking for those days in Rome was the 'already out there now real' insight - something I could imagine. What I realized that day in the shower is that this is different than understanding understanding - or for that matter, any cognitional act.
()
It was the growing sharp distinction between two types of knowing - one rooted in imagination, the other in intelligence - that was at the basis for my coming to know both the inadequacies of Langer's ultimate position in philosophy (in spite of her fine work on art), and the inadequacies of the scholastic philosophy I had been taught

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Geschichte, Analyse, Lonergan, Fortschritt, Niedergang, Erlösung, Kontingenz, Sünde, Christus

Kurzinhalt: Natur - Geschichte, materia, Intelligibilität, analytisches Konzept d. Geschichte, Newtons Bewegung, geschichtl. Vektoren, Sünde, Sünder -> Rechtfertigung; Erlösung durch Wahrheit; Christus das Haupt

Textausschnitt: () It was the beginning of Lonergan's awareness of the distinction between classical and historical consciousness.
()
Human beings, then, are interconnected. From the viewpoint of matter, the human family consists in discrete individuals. But from the viewpoint of intelligibility and intelligible decisions, the human family is interconnected. We are dependent on the wise or foolish decisions of people in the past; we are connected by persuasion and by the intelligent or unintelligent decisions of others before us. 'Thus the heritage of intellectual vacuity and social chaos given by the nineteenth century to the twentieth is the real reason why the twentieth century is such a mess.'
()
three basic 'differentials': what he later called 'vectors,' for understanding the complexity of the ebb and flow of historical process: that is, progress, decline, and renaissance. He will change the names through the years to progress, decline, and redemption
()
Thus, obscurantists to the contrary, there is such a thing as progress. 'It is a matter of intellect. ... To the extent that human beings understand their situations, develop intelligent and reasonable policies, put these policies into effect, there will be progress.
()
In the realm of human history, however, there is not just the thesis of progress, but the antithesis of human decline and sin. Where we would expect to find intelligibility, there is the surd.
()
There is the tendency to self-justification. The sinner hates his shame and his remorse, and cuts the Gordian knot by denying sin to be sin. If he is isolated in his sin, this attempt meets with little success and gives little satisfaction. But if the sinners are many, then the inner lie becomes an outward lie; the liars reinforce one another in their affirmations and fling their doubting consciences aside as superstition, the dark fears that attack man when he is alone. A society in this state is avid of excitement even if the excitement be only noise.
()
Finally, the third 'differential' is 'renaissance' or redemption. 'Man disintegrated by matter can be united only by truth.
()
Finally, the third 'differential' is 'renaissance' or redemption. 'Man disintegrated by matter can be united only by truth.' 'Christ is the supernatural head of man, first in the order of nature, of voluntary membership of an intelligible unity in a society, of the personality of the anthropos pneumatikos, of grace.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Hoenen, Herkunft d. Prinzipien, (Ganzes - Teile); Cajetan, intellectus agens; Thomas, Scotus: Verstehen -- Begriffsbildung, De Veritate, Scotus -> Kant

Kurzinhalt: Hoenen was convinced that mathematical principles could not be derived ... from a mere analysis of the terms of those principles. The question was: what is the origin of an intellectual first principle such as: the whole is greater than the part?

Textausschnitt: 2/6 From his studies on mathematics Hoenen was convinced that mathematical principles could not be derived, as generally scholastics had held, from a mere analysis of the terms of those principles. The question was: what is the origin of an intellectual first principle such as: the whole is greater than the part? Traditional scholasticism had interpreted such knowledge as a comparison of concepts, such as 'whole,' 'part,' 'greater than.' On the contrary, Hoenen contended, first principles derived from an insight into the image, the 'phantasm,' and a grasp of the 'nexus' or relationship between the terms in the phantasm. Experience, then, at least imaginative experience, was necessary for the abstraction of both universal ideas and universal principles. 'We experience in singular instances the nexus between the subject and predicate and from this experience we attain to an intellectual grasp of the nature of this nexus. Consequently, without previous analysis the resultant knowledge, because it is derived from experience, will be immediate and, because it concerns the nature, universal and necessary.'1 (91f; Fs)

3/6 Hoenen presents quotes from Thomas de vio Cajetan, the sixteenth-century commentator on St. Thomas, giving his understanding of Aquinas and Aristotle on this point. According to Cajetan, Aristotle felt that even empirical science was a grasping of the universal in the particular. 'Hence Aristotle in the same context adds the assertion that from the experimental knowledge of this and that herb there results the complex universal: every herb of this kind cures this kind of disease.'2 Hoenen summarizes Cajetan's summary of Aristotle on the process of abstraction: (92; Fs)

The intellect is only moved by that which is intelligible in act; but intelligible realities, as they are found in particular instances, are only intelligible in very remote potency because of an excess of materiality; in order that they may be gradually reduced to act, they are first brought to the exterior senses, then to the common sense, then to the cogitative faculty; then a frequent conversion and operation of the cogitative faculty is required in order that the realities may become close to intelligibility in act.3

4/6 An intellectual process is required then, whereby the presentations of sense and the representations of imagination are brought to the point at which understanding can grasp an intelligibility. Hoenen gives Cajetan's own understanding: 'Then when the matter has been so disposed and reduced to such a degree of spirituality, it becomes, by the operation of the agent intellect, truly universal and intelligible in act, and consequently moves the possible intellect to knowledge of itself.'4 (92f; Fs)

5/6 The opposite opinion, that of Duns Scotus, was simple: the agent intellect abstracts universal terms and concepts from experience and compares those terms and concepts. Some years later Lonergan would summarize the Scotist position: (93; Fs)

Scotus posits concepts first, then the apprehension of nexus between concepts. His species intelligibilis [eg: species intelligibilis] is what is meant immediately by external words; it is proved to exist because knowing presupposes its object and indeed its object as present; its production by agent intellect and phantasm is the first act of intellect, with knowing it as second act or inner word; it is not necessarily an accident inhering in the intellect but necessarily only a sufficiently present agent cooperating with intellect in producing the act of knowing; ordinarily it is the subordinate, but may be the principal, agent; sensitive knowledge is merely the occasion for scientific knowledge; as our inner word proceeds from the species, so the divine word proceeds from the divine essence. The Scotist rejection of insight into phantasm necessarily reduced the act of understanding to seeing a nexus between concepts; hence, while for Aquinas understanding precedes conceptualization which is rational, for Scotus, understanding is preceded by conceptualization which is a matter of metaphysical mechanics.5 (notabene)

6/6 This misunderstanding of the human process of knowing as some kind of 'metaphysical mechanics' is a recurrent theme in Lonergan's writings. We already noted his statement in the Blandyke Papers where he opposes any 'mechanical' theory of reasoning on the analogy of a slot machine: 'Put in a penny, pull the trigger, and the transition to a box of matches is spontaneous, immediate and necessary.' Elsewhere he will say our process of coming to know is not a kind of 'metaphysical sausage machine, at one end slicing species off phantasm, and at the other popping out concepts.'6 And again, still later, our mind is not a 'black box' in which there is sensitive 'input' at one end and words emerge as 'output' at the other end.7 On the contrary, as Lonergan was increasingly to formulate it, our understanding is a conscious process of 'grasping the intelligible in the sensible.' And this fact about our human knowing can be grasped by concretely attending to our own human understanding in act. (93; Fs)

7/6 Hoenen's article directed Lonergan to where this position could be found in St. Thomas Aquinas. In his commentary on Boethius' De Trinitate Thomas speaks of the first principles of the sciences, such as 'every whole is greater than its parts': (94; Fs)

These principles, known by nature, become manifest to the human person by the light of the agent intellect, which is part of our nature; indeed, by this light, nothing becomes evident to us except in so far as, through it, the phantasms are rendered intelligible in act. For this is the act of the agent intellect, as is said in the De Anima. But the phantasms are derived from sensation; hence the starting point for the knowledge of these principles is sense and memory, as the Philosopher notes at the end of the Posterior Analytics.8 (notabene)

8/6 Human knowledge begins with sense and imagination, therefore, but it does so in the light of the agent intellect: that within us that can shed intelligible light on our experience. In the De Veritate Aquinas says: (94; Fs)

There pre-exist in us certain seeds of the sciences such as the first conceptions of the intellect, which are immediately known by the light of the agent intellect by means of the species abstracted from the sense impressions, whether they be complex, such as the first principles or in-complex, such as the notion of 'being,' and 'one' and such like, which the intellect apprehends immediately. For from those universal principals flow all other principles as from certain seminal reasons.9

9/6 As in Lonergan's early Blandyke Papers, there is an insistence in Hoenen's interpretation of St. Thomas on focussing on the imaginative particular, the schema, as distinct from a focus on universal concepts. But there is also in Aquinas, as well, a metaphysical theory of intellect comprising such terms as the 'agent intellect,' the 'possible intellect,' 'species,' 'abstraction,' etc. What do all these terms mean? What is the origin of all these metaphysical terms that Lonergan had heard bandied about since his student days at Heythrop? That could well have been the young Lonergan's question at the time. Hoenen gave him some clues. For example, he quotes a Thomistic text that Lonergan himself will often quote through the years: (94; Fs)

Anyone can verify this in his own experience, that when he is trying to understand something, he forms some phantasms for himself by way of examples, and in these he as it were looks at what he wants to understand. It is for the same reason that when we want to have someone understand something, we offer him examples by means of which he may be able to form images for himself to aid his understanding.10

10/6 As Lonergan will later bring out, Aquinas is appealing to the reader's own inner experience, his or her own consciousness of themselves as sensing, imagining, understanding. As imagination is important in properly human knowing, so also is the act of understanding. 'As we, without any discourse, know the principles by a simple act of understanding, so also the angels know all that they know; hence they are called intellectual beings; and the habit of the principles in us is called intellect.11 [...] The intellect is so called because of its inward penetration of the truth; reason is so named because of its inquiry and discourse.'12 (95; Fs)

11/6 In general, Lonergan has high praise for Hoenen. He later spoke of him as in the tradition of Thomistic writers for whom he came to have high respect, such as Rousselot and Peghaire.13 He will have high praise for Hoenen's book La théorie du jugement d'après S. Thomas d'Aquin.14 He will attribute to Hoenen the discovery of the eclipse of the act of understanding in the scholastic tradition due to the acceptance of Duns Scotus' theory of knowledge.15 It was Hoenen who discovered the Scotist presuppositions in Kantian thought.16 A point that Lonergan will later point out in regard to Hoenen's work, however, is that the latter's terminology - 'abstracting the nexus from the phantasm' - is Scotist. (95; Fs)

But that terminology - that from phantasm are abstracted not only terms, concepts but also the nexus between concepts - you won't find either in Aristotle or Aquinas. That language is purely Scotist - terms with a nexus between them. You'll find that in Scotus, but you won't find it in Thomas. I've never run across Thomist texts of that type, as far as I can remember; that isn't his way of speaking. What he says is that what you abstract from phantasm is species - species is translating Aristotle's eidos. [...] If you want to say what's grasped by insight, you have Aristotle's expression: form, to ti en einai. It's not a matter simply of a nexus between terms; it's also that, but to describe it as a nexus between terms is a special case relevant to mathematics. Unity is another case - substantial unity. And if what is grasped by insight is form, what is expressed is related concepts. The presentation, the attention, has been so concentrated on the universal and the concept that the notion of the concept has permanence. But conscious intelligence is missing.17



() The question was: what is the origin of an intellectual first principle such as: the whole is greater than the part? Traditional scholasticism had interpreted such knowledge as a comparison of concepts, such as 'whole,' 'part,' 'greater than.' On the contrary, Hoenen contended, first principles derived from an insight into the image, the 'phantasm,' and a grasp of the 'nexus' or relationship between the terms in the phantasm. ... Consequently, without previous analysis the resultant knowledge, because it is derived from experience, will be immediate and, because it concerns the nature, universal and necessary.'
()
The Scotist rejection of insight into phantasm necessarily reduced the act of understanding to seeing a nexus between concepts; hence, while for Aquinas understanding precedes conceptualization which is rational, for Scotus, understanding is preceded by conceptualization which is a matter of metaphysical mechanics.
()
These principles, known by nature, become manifest to the human person by the light of the agent intellect, which is part of our nature; indeed, by this light, nothing becomes evident to us except in so far as, through it, the phantasms are rendered intelligible in act. For this is the act of the agent intellect, as is said in the De Anima. But the phantasms are derived from sensation; hence

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Irrtum, Erkenntnis, Urteil, Intuitionismus

Kurzinhalt: Problem des Irrtums, Keeler, Kausalursache, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Suarez, Scotus, Thomas, virtuell Unbedingtes,

Textausschnitt: () For if we are looking for the formal cause of knowledge, that cause cannot be just things themselves. For if this were the case, false knowledge could never be generated - unless perhaps things themselves were false.
()
Descartes realized that there was a problem of error and so introduced epistemology or the science of the criteria of truth. However, by reducing judgment to will he contributed little to solving the problem. Nor can Hume's pure phenomenalism explain error - unless the phenomena contradict themselves. Nor can Kantianism explain error since 'the immutable laws of mind' can only bring forth the same fruit, in no way any contradictions.
()
... that for St. Thomas the apprehension of a nexus is one thing, the act of assent is another; the former dwelling in the purely intelligible world, the latter affirming the objective existence of the intellectual content. ... On the other hand, when a proposition is present to the mind without full evidence, the way is open for the undue influence of the will.
()
A complexus of terms is appearing in the analysis of judgment: the prior need for evidence and for understanding the sufficiency of the evidence; the need not to be too 'precipitous' in judging; the possibilities of the undue influence of imagination, desire and bad will on judgment.
() .. that the young Lonergan is convinced that knowledge of existence does not take place through a simple apprehension or intuition. In fact, he speaks later of his need at this time to break with 'intuitionism.'

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Maréchal, Kant, Thomas, Gilson,

Kurzinhalt: Maréchal: Kant als Idealist; Erkenntnis: statisch - dynamisch; 'in here' - 'out there'; Idealismus, Scotus - Hegel, das bedingte Unbedingte, diskursives Erkennen

Textausschnitt: () Kant had maintained that a 'critique of knowledge,' that is, a study of 'the conditions of the possibility of knowledge,' only revealed the forms and categories of human knowing, but in no way revealed the possibilities of objective knowledge. For Kant objective knowledge would be possible only on the basis of an intellectual intuition, and since he discerned no such intuition, the objectivity of human knowledge disintegrates.
()
... Maréchal maintained that Kant became an idealist because he was not consistent in his own transcendental reflection on the a priori conditions of human knowledge.
() ... 'in here' to 'out there?' I remember very vividly being told that the only answer is to dogmatically assert that our knowledge does cross over that bridge, that we do get from 'in here' to 'out there' and any analysis of our cognitional activities risks leaving us trapped 'in here' in an idealism.
()
'Five hundred years separate Hegel from Scotus. As will appear from our discussion of the method of metaphysics, that notable interval of time was largely devoted to working out in a variety of manners the possibilities of the assumption that knowing consists in taking a look.'
()
In other words, human knowledge emerges when you arrive at judgment. And a judgment is not simply having a nexus between terms. Any hypothesis includes a nexus between terms. It is when you are positing the nexus between terms, when you are affirming or denying a nexus that you arrive at judgment.
()
Lonergan learned that human knowledge is discursive, that is, incremental: it proceeds by acts of experiencing, understanding, and judging to limited knowledge of reality and then the cycle of knowing begins again to fill out perspectives or to rise to higher viewpoints. Unlike the Kantian, the idealist and the relativist traditions that felt that you had to know 'everything about everything' in order to arrive at certain judgments, Maréchal pointed out the concrete activity of judging that posits the concrete existence of understood contents of thought.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Erkenntnislehre, Konverison, Definition, Grundirrtum

Kurzinhalt: Epistemologie, persönliche Angelegenheit, Brief v. 1935, nexus, Scotus, intellektuelle Konversion, agens

Textausschnitt: () 'An exact account of knowledge raises the epistemological problems in a real fashion, not merely in the sense of refuting adversaries, but also in the sense of solving personal problems-and not how I am going to help other people that are in difficulties, but how I'm going to help myself!
()
... process of self-appropriation taking place, not publicly, but privately. The process takes place in the hiddenness of one's presence to oneself and one's growing knowledge of oneself. Nevertheless, as Lonergan goes on to say in the same introduction, though the act is private, both its antecedents and its consequents have their public manifestation.
()
The issue is joined. The Scotist and Suarezian presupposition of intellectual knowledge as 'seeing the nexus' between the concepts of a universal judgment is the basic misunderstanding in most philosophical thought.
()
In Lonergan's future writings he will maintain that this basic misinterpretation of intellectual knowledge as a type of 'seeing' is the fundamental error in cognitional theory. It is at the root of the basic counter-positions in philosophy, whether in their naive realist, empiricist, or idealist forms. Let us call to mind his definition of intellectual conversion from thirty-seven years later. 'Intellectual conversion is a radical clarification and, consequently, the elimination of an exceedingly stubborn and misleading myth concerning reality, objectivity, and knowledge. The myth is that knowing is like looking, that objectivity is seeing what is there to be seen and not seeing what is not there, and that the real is out there now to be looked at.'
()
I can work out a luminous and unmistakable meaning to intellectus agens et possibilis, abstractio, conversio to phantasm, etc., etc. The Thomists cannot even give a meaning to most of this.'
()
I am certain (and I am not one who becomes certain easily) that I can put together a Thomistic metaphysic of history that will throw Hegel and Marx, despite the enormity of their influence on this very account, into the shade.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Lonergan, Grundeinsichten, Vorsehung

Kurzinhalt: Brief 1935, Kurzübersicht über Philosophie, Frage nach dem Zusammenhang (comon thread), Grundfrage an d. Vorgesetzten,

Textausschnitt: () All are linked together by a common thread: the accurate or inaccurate account of human intelligence.
()
Briefly, this question is: shall the matter be left to providence to solve according to its own plan; or do you consider that providence intends to use my superiors as conscious agents in the furtherance of what it has already done?

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Leeming, Marechal; Inkarnation, Suarez, distinctio realis, Definition, Hypostase, Person, Durchbruch, distinctio realis (major or minor); 1 Person, 2 Naturen; hypostatische Union, Chalcedon

Kurzinhalt: ... which convinced me that there could not be a hypostatic union without a real distinction between essence and existence ... if you have a real distinction between esse and essence, the esse can be the ground of the person and the essence ...

Textausschnitt: 29/7 Lonergan always attributed his basic intellectual conversion to the course he took in the Catholic doctrine on Christ in the fall and spring of 1935-1936 with the Jesuit, Bernard Leeming, S.J. (1893-1971). Of course, he brought his own questions to Leeming's course! (114; Fs)

30/7 To Leeming, along with Maréchal, Lonergan attributes his first acceptance of the label 'Thomist.' 'I had become a Thomist through the influence of Maréchal mediated to me by Stephanos Stephanou and through Bernard Leeming's lectures on the unicum esse in Christo.'1 The whole of his previous development was 'rounded out' by Leeming's course: that is, at this point all the intellectual influences from his early years come together. (114; Fs)

It was through Stephanou by some process of osmosis, rather than struggling with the five great Cahiers, that I learnt to speak of human knowledge as not intuitive but discursive with the decisive component in judgment. This view was confirmed by my familiarity with Augustine's key notion, veritas, and the whole was rounded out by Bernard Leeming's course on the Incarnate Word, which convinced me that there could not be a hypostatic union without a real distinction between essence and existence. This, of course, was all the more acceptable, since Aquinas' esse corresponded to Augustine's veritas and both harmonized with Maréchal's view of judgment.2

31/7 As someone once said to me, 'Moments of enlightenment come during periods of enlightenment.' That this was a period of enlightenment is certainly evident from the feeling-charged letter Lonergan wrote to his superior in January 1935. But 'the whole' of his previous development was 'rounded out' by this moment in Leeming's course, the moment he later remembered as the key moment in his own intellectual conversion. (114; Fs)

32/7 The precise question that was being dwelt with in the course was the unicum esse in Christo, the one act of existence in Christ. What did this mean? What was this 'unicum esse in Christo'? The basic theological issue came down to this: If, as Christian faith always held, Christ was both divine and human, what were these 'two' in him? Furthermore, if we must maintain that there is an underlying and substantial unity in Christ, what is that 'one' in him? (114; Fs)

33/7 At the time traditional European scholastic philosophers were engaged in a battle over the 'real distinction' between essence and existence. Many traditional Thomists held the real distinction between these two principles of being, but others, especially Jesuits influenced by Suarez, denied the distinction and its presence in St. Thomas.3 I remember Jesuits telling me that even during the 1950s, soon after entering the society, they were approached by other young Jesuits during recreation periods to ascertain their fundamental feelings on the 'real distinction.' Difficult as it may seem to believe to people today, it was a question which, at least for some, had an existential import! In an interview Lonergan gives an account of the relevance of the controversy. (115; Fs)
I was very interested in philosophy, but I [had] no use for the scholastic philosophers. I first discovered that Saint Thomas might have something to say when I was taught 'De Verbo Incarnate' in Rome. Can you have one person who has two natures? The argument given me by a good Thomist, Father Bernard Leeming, was that if you have a real distinction between esse and essence, the esse can be the ground of the person and the essence too. If the esse is relevant to two essences, then you can have one person in two natures. On that basis I solved the problem of Christ's consciousness: one subject and two subjectivities. It wasn't the divine subjectivity that was crucified, but the human subjectivity; it was the human subjectivity that died and rose again, not the divine person.4

34/7 The theological problem was to maintain the full integrity of the humanity of Christ and at the same time to explain why such a full humanity is not that of another person besides the person of the Word of God. Francisco Suarez, who held the real identity of essence and existence, held that the personhood of Christ was merely a 'substantial mode' added to the existing essence. To Suarez' position Leeming in his Christology textbook replied that it was not at all evident why a fully existing singular nature would not by that very fact be a suppositum, that is, a thing in itself. The Suarezian 'mode,' in this case the personhood of Christ, seems to be nothing other than an accidental property of something already fully constituted in itself. (115; Fs)

35/7 Leeming chose to follow the opinion which he believed was that of St. Thomas, the opinion also of the Thomistic commentator, Capreolus (1380-1444). The latter held that the core of personhood is to have one's own existence in oneself. By the very fact that essence is united with existence, there is the subsistence and 'incommunicability' of personhood. Capreolus' opinion, Leeming felt, best maintains the integrity of the human nature of Christ, while also explaining the unity of Christ. (115f; Fs)
It shows that Christ is one person, precisely because he has one esse, one act of existence; it shows that in which the human nature and the divine nature communicate: that is, in the esse of the Word; but it leaves the human nature entirely whole in its essence. Christ is one; truly the Son of God is human; truly this man is God; and in these sentences the word 'is' is indeed a logical copula; but in our opinion it is much more than that: it is especially taken in a real sense and not just as a denotation.5

36/7 Leeming goes on in his notes to comment on the use of such philosophical distinctions in the understanding of a theological and religious doctrine. (116; Fs)

Someone might say that this opinion is grounded on a philosophical distinction that, if not uncertain, is at least denied by many, namely the real distinction between essence and existence. To which we reply: the revealed dogma evidently teaches a truth which can be called philosophical: namely, that a singular nature cannot be identified with personhood. We should, therefore, clarify our philosophical concepts in such a way that this truth remains uncontested. But, if among the philosophical systems that try to explain this truth, one is found to be more apt than the others to properly protect this truth, while the others are less apt, then this is obviously an argument in favor of that system.6

37/7 What the terms essence and existence add to Lonergan's philosophical vocabulary are the objective correlatives of the subjective acts he has been so intent on differentiating in his own consciousness. As he would later point out, Aristotle had basically pointed to two types of questions that the human spirit asks: questions of the type, 'What is it?' or 'Why is it so?' and questions of the type, 'Is it?' or 'Is it so?' The first type of question cannot be answered by a 'Yes' or a 'No.' This type of question heads toward an understanding of the nature of something, eventually, its essence. On the other hand, the second type of question can only be answered by a 'Yes' or a 'No'- or 'I don't know.' It aims at judgment, the determination of existence. (116; Fs)

38/7 What Lonergan was coming to see, the core of his own intellectual breakthrough, was that the entire Aristotelian metaphysical system of Aquinas was really the objective 'heuristic' framework for the acts he had all along been so intent on coming to know. One dimension of that metaphysical system was the real distinction between essence and existence. Later on he would define a distinction as real if it is true that (1) P is not Q; (2) P is real; and (3) Q is real. A real distinction is asserted on the level of judgment, not on any previous level of consciousness, certainly not by a prior imagined 'look.'7 Such real distinctions are major or minor. Major real distinctions are between things. Minor real distinctions are between the elements or constituents of proportionate being, such as between essence and existence. (116f; Fs)

39/7 In his Latin Christology notes, written during the 1950s, Lonergan uses the distinction between soul and body as an example of a minor real distinction between constitutive principles of a person.8 He then shows from Church doctrines the effort to express this kind of a distinction in understanding the humanity and divinity of the one person of Christ. It is not just a mental distinction, a distinctio rationis. It is a real distinction, though a minor real distinction: not between two things, but between two principles in the one person of Christ. Of course, because it is a case of understanding the humanity and divinity of the Son of God, all these terms have to be understood analogously. (117; Fs)

40/7 Certainly, such a distinction puts a great weight on words. But so does modern science. And so do all the doctrines of the Church. They reflect the understandings and judgments of the human family. They mediate our knowledge of reality. As he would later point out in the article 'The Origins of Christian Realism,' the ability to make such distinctions is rooted in the fact that we are human beings. We exist, not just in the infant's world of immediacy, but in the far vaster world mediated by meaning.9 (117; Fs)

41/7 An empiricist or a naive realist confuses the criteria for knowing the world mediated by meaning with the criteria for the world of immediacy. The latter is known by merely feeling and touching and seeing. The idealist knows there is more to human knowing than what the empiricist or naive realist assert, but he conceives that 'more' in sensitive terms and so concludes that our knowing cannot be objective. The critical realist asserts that objective human knowing takes place, not just by experience, but by experience completed by human understanding and correct judgment. (117; Fs) (notabene)

42/7 The Thomistic metaphysical terms used by the Christian community to interpret its belief are 'heuristic' categories correlative to human understanding and judgment. Just as the scientist uses technical terms to penetrate to the constituents of physical reality, so the theologian uses terms like 'nature,' 'person,' 'essence,' 'existence,' to understand the realities of Christian faith. They aid our human understanding. While later developments put persons and natures in many further contexts, the context of the ancient Council of Chalcedon needs no more than these heuristic concepts. (117f; Fs)
What is a person or hypostasis? It is in the Trinity what there are three of and in the Incarnation what there is one of. What is a nature? In the Trinity it is what there is one of and in the Incarnation what there are two of.10

43/7 Though such a heuristic understanding seems incredibly 'simple,' still it can be a tremendously rich method of focussing our thinking within the framework of the judgments of faith. It is similar to the methods of the scientists that enable them to focus on unseen realities far beyond the realm of immediate experience. (118; Fs)

44/7 It was in relationship to this course in 1935-1936 with Bernard Leeming on Christology that Lonergan first uses the term 'intellectual conversion' to identify the intellectual transition he was undergoing. (118; Fs)

So there was considerable room for development after Aristotle and you get it in St. Thomas when he distinguishes existence from essence and makes them really distinct; and to make them distinct really you have to have something equivalent to an intellectual conversion even if you don't know what is meant by an intellectual conversion. I had the intellectual conversion myself when in doing theology I saw that you can't have one person in two natures in Christ unless there is a real distinction between the natures and something else that is one. But that is the long way around.11

45/7 Lonergan spoke of his intellectual breakthrough as taking 'the long way around,' since it came by way of his theology course on Thomistic Christology. He implies that there could be a short way around-perhaps by reading his Insight? (118; Fs)

46/7 In the same interview Lonergan gives a pithy description of the ultimate psychological and intellectual basis for the Thomistic real distinction between essence and existence. 'I once gave a talk to psychiatrists at Halifax General Hospital and at the end of the talk one of the doctors said to me, 'Our patients have all kinds of insights; the trouble is they're wrong!' Well that is the basis of the distinction between essence and existence. They have hold of an essence, but it isn't true.'12 (118f; Fs)

47/7 Before going on, let us note a line from his 1972 Method in Theology where he explicitly speaks of faith in the Word of God as a possible source of intellectual conversion. (119; Fs)
Finally, among the values discerned by the eye of love is the value of believing the truths taught by the religious tradition, and in such tradition and belief are the seeds of intellectual conversion. For the word, spoken and heard, proceeds from and penetrates to all four levels of intentional consciousness. Its content is not just a content of experience but a content of experience and understanding and judging and deciding. The analogy of sight yields the cognitional myth. But fidelity to the word engages the whole man.13

48/7 In the mid-1930s it seems obvious that Lonergan has explicitly recognized 'the cognitional myth' that conceives of intellectual activities in sensible terms. But if, as in his own case, intellectual conversion is promoted by faith in the Word of God, still in itself it regards coming to know the intrinsic character of our own human intelligence and the relationship of that intelligence to reality. (119; Fs)

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Thorem: das Übernatürliche (Philip der Kanzler); Gnade, Freiheit, Natur; Thomas, Banez, Molina

Kurzinhalt: Lonergan chose as his topic the idea of operative grace, gratia operans, in St. Thomas ...

Textausschnitt: 1. The Theorem of the Supernatural

9/8 Lonergan chose as his topic the idea of operative grace, gratia operans, in St. Thomas. Years later his dissertation would be published under the title Grace and freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. The topic found its origins in Augustine's conflict with the Pelagians: How does God's grace act in the human person? How does God, in the words of Ezekiel, pluck out our heart of stone and place within us a heart of flesh-particularly if our heart basically wants to remain in its stony condition? Such is the work of operative grace: And what about our human freedom? If our human freedom is to be taken seriously, does that make God dependent on our actions? How does the grace of God 'cooperate' with our human freedom? (125f; Fs)

10/8 This problem had vexed the Medieval theologians who reflected on Augustine's works. One problem, as Lonergan expressed it, was to explain why everything was not grace. After all, what is there that is not a free gift of God?1 The problem also vexed the Renaissance theologians after Thomas. They basically came down on two sides of the problem: the Dominican followers of Banez held for a physical predetermination in the free action of the will. On the other side, the Jesuit followers of Molina posited a mediating type of knowledge in God (a scientia media) which enabled God to know future free actions and what human beings 'would do' in certain situations. This latter position, Lonergan remarked, was what his Suarezian teacher at Heythrop, Fr. Bolland, had held. (126; Fs)

11/8 Lonergan soon concluded that both of the traditional explanations were insufficient. Both failed to set aside their initial interests and concerns to enter into the world and concerns of Aquinas. Noting his growing awareness of historical method, Lonergan noted: 'My own experience of this change was in writing my doctoral dissertation. I had been brought up a Molinist. I was studying St. Thomas' thought on Gratia Operans, a study later published in Theological Studies, 1941-1942. Within a month or so it was completely evident to me that Molinism had no contribution to make to an understanding of Aquinas.'2 (126; Fs)

12/8 In the original introduction to his dissertation, Lonergan set out his methodological principles. Among these was the very form of speculative development itself. Such a scheme 'is capable of synthesizing any possible set of historical data irrespective of their place and time, just as the science of mathematics constructs a generic scheme capable of synthesizing any possible set of quantitative phenomena.'3 Instead of either reading into the text hypotheses out of contemporary concerns or, on the other hand, like a 'jelly-fish,' just enumerating endless texts, the historian of ideas employs a 'pincer' movement that moves from the speculative understanding of the most general ideas of a development to a concrete understanding of the developments manifested in the texts. (126f; Fs)

13/8 The core of the solution to understanding Aquinas' thought on grace is found in the 'theorem' of the supernatural order. A theorem is a technical term with an exact philosophic definition whose implications are consistently faced and worked out within a total system of thought.4 It differs from a common sense term as the scientific term 'acceleration' differs from the common term 'going faster.' The system of thought within which this theorem is to be understood is Aquinas' whole theology. Aquinas himself took over this theorem of the supernatural from Philip, the Chancellor of the University of Paris. It implied the validity of the term 'nature.' (127; Fs)

What Philip the Chancellor systematically posited was not the supernatural character of grace, for that was already known and acknowledged, but the validity of a line of reference termed nature. In the long term and in the concrete the real alternatives remain charity and cupidity, the elect and the massa damnata. But the whole problem lies in the abstract, in human thinking: the fallacy in early thought had been an unconscious confusion of the metaphysical abstraction, nature, with concrete data which do not quite correspond; Philip's achievement was the creation of a mental perspective, the introduction of a set of coordinates, that eliminated the basic fallacy and its attendant host of anomalies.5 (127; Fs)

14/8 Thomas took over Philip's achievement as the central core of his own massive theological Summae. Within the context of his belief in the creative and redemptive action of God, Aquinas came to affirm the reality and consistency of 'secondary causes,' the reality and integrity of the world of natural creation. Commenting on his meaning some years later Lonergan noted: 'It was urged that we have to drop the words 'nature,' 'natural,' that we should be content to speak with Scripture and the Fathers of God's grace and man's sinfulness. Now I have no doubt that such words as 'nature' and 'natural' [...] can be abused. But I also have no doubt that if we are not only going to speak about God's grace and man's sinfulness but also we are going to say what precisely we mean by such speaking, then we are going to have to find some third term over and above grace and sin.'6 (127; Fs)

15/8 For the grace of God to be understood precisely as grace, as a free gift to one who cannot claim it as his right; and for sin to be understood as sin, as falling short of what one really is; then a middle term between sin and grace must be introduced. Medieval theology, particularly in Aquinas, introduced such a term in the word 'nature.' Such was a revolution in the world of theory, the first of several that Lonergan studied during his lifetime. (128; Fs)
Still this assertion of dogmatic continuity must not obscure the existence of a 'Copernican revolution' in theory: the center of the whole issue shifted violently; certain developments were released at once; others followed in a series of intervals, change implying further change, till the genius of St. Thomas Aquinas mastered the situation.7

16/8 In his dissertation Lonergan's intellectual conversion found expression in the discovery of the radically systematic character of Aquinas' thought on grace and the supernatural. The elements of this system are understood in their relationships to each other and not in common sense categories. In this area Aquinas adopts and transposes Aristotle's systematic metaphysics for his own theological ends. (128; Fs)

17/8 In all of this the undertow of Aristotelian philosophy is felt. Treating of the Church's appeal to reason in his notes on the philosophy of history, Lonergan had noted: 'The purely scientific character of the appeal to reason as well as the definition of the limits of that appeal was more than emphasized by the audacity of St. Thomas of Aquin who based his thought on Aristotle precisely because Aristotle was the most scientific.'8 (128; Fs)

18/8 In the introduction to his dissertation Lonergan pays tribute to the centrality of Aristotle in the history of philosophy. 'Philosophy as philosophia perennis is man's apprehension of the eternal and immutable. Like all limited being, it is potentiality and achievement, dunamis and energeia, potency and act. Its potency is the love of wisdom: it is detachment, orientation, inspiration. Its act is the triumph of the reason systematically revealing the light of the eternal in the light of common day. For all time the potency is represented by Plato, the act by Aristotle.'9 Later Lonergan would use a culinary image to speak of the relationship of Plato to Aristotle: 'Nobody would be able to read Aristotle if he hadn't studied Plato[...] You have to have the hors d'oeuvres before you start eating the meal.'10 (128f; Fs)

19/8 Plato, inspired by Socrates, set the questions for philosophy: what is the real as opposed to the merely apparent? true knowledge as opposed to opinion? What does it mean to know something? As Lonergan would often point out, Plato's Socrates sought universal definitions: what is the meaning of justice? He sought a definition that refers to every instance of justice and only to justice. Neither he nor the Athenians were able to come up with such a definition. But the difference between them was that he knew that he did not know, but they, thinking they knew, did not know. His was a docta ignorantia, a learned ignorance. He revealed to his fellow citizens the confusion in their own minds and the Delphic oracle deemed him the wisest of all because he knew that he did not know. (129; Fs)

20/8 To Plato's questions Aristotle brought science and system. He could supply those definitions by means of his theoretical framework in which the terms fixed the relationships and the relationships fixed the terms and both were grasped in a synthetic unity by the human mind. It was Aristotle's whole metaphysical 'system' that, by way of the Arabs, had entered into the medieval university and was the cultural 'coin of the realm' in which philosophical and theological issues were joined. Through the Arab philosophers Aristotelian categories had penetrated the medieval universities. (129; Fs)
The Thomists were quoting Aristotle in the same way they were quoting Augustine, except that they quoted Aristotle more frequently. (Anyone quoted was for them a 'Father of the Church.') But Aristotle was serving quite a different purpose than Augustine. He was supplying them with the means of having a coherent set of solutions when they were solving questions. He was supplying them with what is called a conceptuality, a Begrifflichkeit-in other words, a set of terms and relations where the terms fix the relations and the relations fix the terms and the whole set is verifiable.11

21/8 So Aquinas employed Aristotle's whole conceptual framework with its interlocking terms and relationships to flesh out the whole order of nature. Aristotle's interlocking network of terms: matter and form, substance and accident, habits and acts, etc., are used by Aquinas to solve all kinds of problems that had baffled previous theologians and writers. The value of such a system was that it was theoretical: it presented a basic set of terms and principles with which to handle a multitude of problems. It was, to use the word Lonergan loved, 'methodical.' Aquinas transposed such method into the medieval context of the questio, the technique of systematically asking and answering questions. Speaking of Aquinas' Contra Gentiles, Lonergan says: 'If one reads a series of successive chapters, one finds the same arguments recurring over and over in ever slightly different forms; what was going forward when the Contra Gentiles was being written, was the differentiation of operations and their conjunction in ever fresh combinations.'12 (130; Fs)

22/8 This will basically be the underlying form of Lonergan's own method. But our point here is that in order for Lonergan to have understood Aquinas, it was necessary for him to have already broken through personally into an explicit understanding of what years later he will call 'the world of theory.' (130; Fs)
If man's practical bent is to be liberated from magic and turned toward the development of science, if his critical bent is to be liberated from myth and turned towards the development of philosophy, if his religious concern is to renounce aberrations and accept purification, then all three will be served by a differentiation of consciousness, a recognition of a world of theory. In such a world things are conceived and known, not in their relations to our sensory apparatus or to our needs and desires, but in the relations constituted by their uniform interactions with one another [...]. This differentiation of consciousness is illustrated by the Platonic contrast of the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds, of Aristotle's distinction and correlation of what is first for us and what is first absolutely, of Aquinas' hymns and his systematic theology [...].13

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Transzendenz; Grundirrtum: Freiheit, Gnade; Bilderdenken, Thomas, Lonergan - Konversion;

Kurzinhalt: The Transcendence of Imaginative Thinking

Textausschnitt: 2. The Transcendence of Imaginative Thinking

23/8 Besides the pervasive evidence of Lonergan's 'systematic' understanding of Aquinas that made it possible for him to understand both the development of Christian thought up to Aquinas and the development within Aquinas' own understanding, perhaps the most evident instance of Lonergan's own intellectual conversion can be discerned in the sections dealing with Aquinas' understanding of divine transcendence and human liberty. According to Lonergan Aquinas had at hand the tools, such as a theory of human liberty, with which it was possible to show actual grace as both operative and cooperative. (130f; Fs)

The free act emerges from, and is conditioned by, created antecedents over which freedom has no direct control. It follows that it is possible for God to manipulate these antecedents and through such manipulation to exercise a control over free acts themselves [...]. Indeed, both above and below, both right and left, the free choice has determinants over which it exercises no control. God directly controls the orientation of the will to ends; indirectly he controls the situations which intellect apprehends and in which will has to choose; indirectly he also controls both the higher determinants of intellectual attitude or mental pattern and the lower determinants of mood and temperament; finally, each choice is free only hic et nunc, for no man can decide today what he is to will tomorrow. There is no end of room for God to work on the free choice without violating it, to govern above its self-governance, to set the stage and guide the reactions and give each character its personal role in the drama of life.1

24/8 Still, none of these created antecedents can be rigorous determinants of the person's free choice: God alone has the property of transcendence. As Augustine's major intellectual break-through was from a corporeal way of thinking about the divine, so Lonergan articulated the same breakthrough systematically in Gratia Operans. (131; Fs)
It is only in the logico-metaphysical simultaneity of the atemporal present that God's knowledge is infallible, his will irresistible, his action efficacious. He exercises control through the created antecedents-true enough; but that is not the infallible, the irresistible, the efficacious, which has its ground not in the creature but in the uncreated, which has its moment not in time but in the cooperation of eternal uncreated action with created and temporal action. Again, the antecedents per se always incline to the right and good. But the consequent act may be good or it may be sinful: if it is good, all the credit is God's, and the creature is only his instrument; but if it is evil, then inasmuch as it is sin as such, it is a surd [...] and so in the causal order a first for which the sinner alone is responsible.2
25/8 Furthermore, God acts in human lives, both providentially and through actual grace. But such action does not involve any change in God. In fact, the projection of such change onto the divine involves a 'picture thinking,' a projection of human common sense categories onto the transcendent action of God. It is similar to the intellectual error from which Augustine had to break on the way to his own religious conversion. (131f; Fs)

26/8 In this regard Lonergan considers the objection that if God knows every event infallibly, if he wills it irresistibly, if he effects it with absolute efficacy, then every event must be necessary and none can be contingent. To this objection Lonergan, following St. Thomas, replies: 'The first fallacy lies in a misconception of time. To a temporal being our four-dimensional universe has three sections: past, present and future. To an eternal 'now' this division is meaningless. On this point St. Thomas never had the slightest doubt: he was always above our pre-Einsteinian illusions that still are maintained by our cosmology manuals; strenuously and consistently he maintained that all events are present to God.'3 He adds in a footnote, 'before time' is 'an illusory figment of the imagination.' (132; Fs)

27/8 The second fallacy lies in supposing God's knowledge of the creature or his activity are some reality in God that would not be there if He had not created. Yet,
God is immutable. He is entitatively identical whether he creates or does not create. His knowledge or will or production of the created universe adds only a relatio rationis to the actus purus. They are predications by extrinsic denomination. Further, it is to be observed that a fallacy on this point is closely connected with fallacious ideas of time. For there can be no predication by extrinsic denomination without the actuality of the extrinsic denominator: else the adaequatio veritatis is not satisfied. Accordingly, to assert that God knows this creature or event, that he wills it, that he effects it, is also ipso facto to assert that the creature or event actually is.4

28/8 To assert that God acts in time is not to project any real change onto God. It is to assert that the assertion 'God acts in time' is true.5 Finally, Lonergan points to another and more basic fallacy often present in conceiving the divine action. (132f; Fs)
It fails to grasp that God is not some datum to be explained, that he is absolute explanation, pure intelligibility in himself, and the first cause and last end of everything else. Accordingly, attempts are made to explain God, to explain the attributes that are identical with God, to reconcile the predicates that have their ontological ground in the absolute simplicity of God. The result is a pseudo-profundity ending in insoluble problems, such as: How can God know the contingent? How can his concursus make him omnipotent without destroying human liberty? and so forth. So much for the fallacies that befog the issue and lead down blind alleys.6

29/8 I am reminded of an interview Lonergan gave in 1970 in which he was asked about 'critically grounding' a religion. His response links religion with intellectual conversion. (133; Fs)
I put the question the other night. A person was demanding that I critically ground this religion and he was talking to Professor So and So and I went up to him and said, 'Would you require Professor So and So to critically ground the love he has for his wife and children?' Being in love is a fact, and it's what you are, it's existential. And your living flows from it. It's the first principle, as long as it lasts. It has its causes and its occasions and its conditions and all the rest of it. But while it's there it's the first principle and it's the source of all one's desires and fears, all the good one can see, and so on. And critically grounding knowledge isn't finding the ground for knowledge. It's already there. Being critical means eliminating the ordinary nonsense, the systematically misleading images and so on; the mythical account. Every scientific or philosophic breakthrough is the elimination of some myth in the pejorative sense; the flat earth, right on. But if you are in love it doesn't need any justification. It's the justification beyond anything else. Just as you don't explain God, God is the ultimate explanation.7

30/8 On being asked: 'Might not one then be deceived?' Lonergan replied: (133; Fs)
One can be deceiving himself. If one is deceiving oneself one is not in love. One is mistaking something for love. Love is something that proves itself. 'By their fruits you shall know them,' and 'in fear and trembling work out your salvation' and all the rest of it. Love isn't cocksure, either.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Verstehen, Aristoteles, Thomas, Lonergan

Kurzinhalt: Verstehen d. Verstehens, Aristoteles: Grundfragen (ti esti, dia ti); Verstehen vor Begriffsbildung, inneres Wort, emanatio intelligibilis, Kreis

Textausschnitt: () Aristotle's basic thesis was the objective reality of what is known by understanding: it was a common sense position inasmuch as common sense always assumes that to be so; but it was not a common sense position inasmuch ... for the denial of soul today is really the denial of the intelligible, the denial that understanding, knowing a cause, is knowing anything real.
()
Lonergan's interest in the dynamism of consciousness led him to ask how that dynamism is present in Aquinas.
()
All this takes place prior to words, even the 'inner words' that are concepts. Concepts and definitions proceed from acts of insight. 'Because the act of understanding-the intelligere proprie-is prior to, and cause of, conceptualization, any attempt to fix the act of understanding, except by way of introspective description, involves its own partial failure; for any such attempt is expression, and expression is no longer understanding and already concept.' Thus, one of Lonergan's perennial examples, the definition of a circle is a set of interrelated concepts rooted in an insight into an image.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Urteil, Meno, Thomas, Lonergan, Prinzipien, Gewissheit, Gott,

Kurzinhalt: Verstehen d. Urteils, Geist: quodammodo omnia, Möglichkeit - Intelligibilität; actus essendi, intellectus agens, Selbstgewissheit des Geistes, prima lux, potens omnia facere et fieri

Textausschnitt: () Again, both acts of understanding have their instrumental or material causes, but the direct act has this cause in the schematic image or phantasm, while the reflective act reviews not only imagination but also sense experience, and direct acts of understanding, and definitions, to find in all taken together the sufficient ground or evidence for a judgment. Hence, while the direct act of understanding generates in definition the expression of the intelligibility of a phantasm, the reflective act generates in judgment the expression of consciously possessed truth through which reality is both known and known to be known.
()
Just as the Platonic Socrates in the Meno asked how the young boy could recognize an answer as an answer, Aquinas saw in the very nature of human intelligence the response to that question. For since our spirits are quodammodo omnia, somehow open to all things, there is within us, in our very ability to question, the notion of being:
()
... the first operation of intellect regards quiddities, but the second, judgment, regards esse, the actus essendi ...
()
... the metaphysical principles of being, of unity, of identity and non-contradiction, etc., all flow from the conscious nature of our intelligence and reason. () the light of agent intellect is said to manifest first principles, to make them evident. In that light the whole of science virtually is ours from the very start. Just as conclusions are convincing because principles are convincing, so our intellectual light derives its efficacy from the prima lux which is God.
()
the potens omnia facere et fieri by which the human intellect is open to all of being. There is no intrinsic limit to our human questioning. (s) The native infinity of intellect as intellect is a datum of rational consciousnes. () Just as Thomist thought is an ontology of knowledge inasmuch as intellectual light is referred to its origin in uncreated Light, so too it is more than an embryonic epistemology inasmuch as intellectual light reflectively grasps its own nature and the commensuration of that nature to the universe of reality.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Extroversion, Materialismus, Idealismus, Realismus, Konfraontation, Identität

Kurzinhalt: Neigung z. Extroversion, philosophia perennis, intelligibile in actu est intellectus in actu; Konfraontation- Identität, Augustinus-Vernunft,

Textausschnitt: () A useful preliminary is to note that animals know, not mere phenomena, but things: ... Accept the sense of reality as criterion of reality, and you are a materialist, sensist, positivist, pragmatist, sentamentalist, and so on, as you please. Accept reason as a criterion but retain the sense of reality as what gives meaning to the term 'real,' and you are an idealist; for like the sense of reality, the reality defined by it is non-rational. In so far as I grasp it, the Thomist position is the clear-headed third position: reason is the criterion and, as well, it is reason-not the sense of reality-that gives meaning to the term 'real.' The real is what is and 'what is,' is known in the rational act, judgment.
()
Materialism, idealism, and naive forms of realism all see knowledge as primarily confrontational. How do we get from 'in here' to 'out there'? But for Aristotle and Aquinas knowledge is primarily by identity: sensibile in actu est sensus in actu, et intelligibile in actu est intellectus in actu. Knowledge is primarily union and only secondarily does the human mind, through understanding and accurate judgment, come to distinguish the trees from the forest in the being it grasps-and by which it is grasped.
()
Lonergan contrasts the Aristotelian-Thomistic view of knowledge primarily by identity with the confrontationism of materialism and even Platonic dualism.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Extroversion, distinctio, Konzeptualist

Kurzinhalt: Neigung z. Extroversion, distinctio realis, Konversion

Textausschnitt: eg: Notwendigkeit der Konverison zur Erfassung der realen distinctio

20/9 This 'real distinction' between essence and existence, ultimately rooted in the real distinction between understanding and judgment, was the core of Lonergan's own 'intellectual conversion' in Bernard Leeming's course on the Incarnate Word in Rome in the mid-1930s. By the mid-forties and his studies of Aquinas he was arriving at expressing that distinction ever more clearly. The culminating step would be his writing of Insight. (143f; Fs)

21/9 An intellectual conversion is needed to grasp all this. So pervasive is 'the native tendency to extroversion' that it appears in a multiplicity of guises. Typically it is found in conceptualist philosophies that are so focussed on concepts that they miss the intellect from which they emerge. 'For intellectual habit is not possession of the book but freedom from the book. It is the birth and life in us of the light and evidence by which we operate on our own.'1 On the contrary, 'Con-ceptualists conceive human intellect only in terms of what it does; but their neglect of what intellect is, prior to what it does, has a variety of causes. Most commonly they do not advert to the act of understanding. They take concepts for granted; they are busy working out arguments to produce certitudes; they prolong their spontaneous tendencies to extroversion into philosophy, where they concentrate on metaphysics and neglect gnoseology.'2 (144; Fs)

22/9 The Aristotelian-Thomist program is not the simple matter of conceiving understanding as some kind of a 'spiritual look' in the tradition of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. (144; Fs)
We can have no knowledge of our intellects except by reflecting on our own acts of understanding. Evidently, the Aristotelian and Thomist program is not a matter of considering ocular vision and then conceiving an analogous spiritual vision that is attributed to a spiritual faculty named intellect. On the contrary, it is a process of introspection that discovers the act of insight into the phantasm and the definition as an expression of the insight, that almost catches intellect in its forward movement towards defining and its backward reference to sense for the concrete realization of the defined.3

23/9 Toward the end of Verbum Lonergan pays tribute to Aquinas' transposition of Aristotle, instead of taking up as his working philosophy the various forms of Platonism that were available. 'Least of all could Aquinas have lost himself in the Platonist fog and at the same time steadily progressed from the Sentences toward the clear and calm, the economic and functional, the balanced and exact series of questions and articles of the via doctrinae in the Summa, in which the intellectualism of Aristotle, made over into the intellectualism of St. Thomas shines as unmistakenly as the sun on the noonday summer hills of Italy.'4 (144; Fs)
24/9 It is in conjunction with these Verbum articles that we find Lonergan's first use of the phrase 'intellectual conversion.' In an early draft of the articles, written around 1945, Lonergan discussed Cajetan's opposition to Scotus: (145; Fs)

But Cajetan was not born an anti-Scotist. He underwent an intellectual conversion [...]. But if Cajetan had to have a conversion to grasp the Aristotelian theory of knowledge by identity, may one not say that that theory is anything but obvious?5

25/9 In conjunction with these emphases in the Verbum articles, we can also point to some other brief statements in book reviews written in the late 1940s. For example, regarding a collection of commentaries on medieval issues, including the real distinction between essence and existence, Lonergan writes: 'George Klubertanz, S.J., deals with the same question in St. Bonaventure, to find that esse and essentia do not differ, while existere, in its technical sense, meant for St. Bonaventure esse hic et nunc; it would seem that there is a patron saint for the naive epistemologists who are concerned exclusively with the real as 'something out there.'6 (145; Fs)

26/9 In another review of Dom Illtyd Trethowan's Certainty: Philosophical and Theological, Lonergan criticizes the author's 'dogmatic intuitionism.' For Trethowan knowledge is intuitive apprehension of certainty, whether in the natural or supernatural order. (145; Fs)
Unfortunately the postulated intuitions do not seem to exist. In its first moment on each level, knowledge seems to be act, perfection, identity; such identity of itself is not a confrontation; confrontation does arise, but only in a second moment and by a distinct act, of perception as distinct from sensation, of conception as distinct from insight, of judgment as distinct from reflective understanding. On this showing confrontation is not primitive, but derived; and it is derived from what is not confrontation, not intuition, nor formal and explicit duality.7

27/9 Lonergan goes on to admit the difficulty of accepting the view he is proposing. It demands a momentous personal change. 'Admittedly it is difficult to justify such derivation. Overtly to accept such difficulty is a basic and momentous philosophic option.' Even the eminent historian of philosophy, Etienne Gilson, is not spared the critique of intuitionism. In a generally favorable review Lonergan adds the reservation: 'Finally, the insistence upon a 'return to sense' and the affirmation of an intuitive experience of acts of existing (pp. 206 f.) are strangely reminiscent of something like Kierkegaard's esthetic sphere of existential subjectivity.'8

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Syllogismus, Logik, Schlussfolgerung

Kurzinhalt: Die Form d. Schlusses, eg: modus ponens

Textausschnitt: () His question is whether there is 'some type of formally valid inference that possesses both the radical simplicity and indefinite flexibility necessary to embrace all other types of reasoning within itself.'
()
If A, then B
But A
Therefore B.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Definition, Realismus, naiv, Wahrheit

Kurzinhalt: Definition des naiven Realismus, davon abhängige Philosophien: Phänomenalismus, Kant, Idealismus, Pragmatismus, Definition vo Wahrheit

Textausschnitt: () ... definition of naive realism: 'You know real objects (sensibly) before you understand and before you think-as the animal knows.' Next he lists a whole series of philosophies that flow from a naive realism: phenomenalism, Kantian criticism, Idealism, pragmatism, Platonism. With all of these he contrasts Aristotle: 'Truth is the correspondence of judgment and reality. Reality is what corresponds to true judgment. It is what is.'

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Punkt, Linie, Euklid, Vorstellung, Definition, Verstehen, Formalursache

Kurzinhalt: Vorstellung - Definition - Verstehen; die Vorstellung, die für etwas steht, unabhängig davon, wem die "Elemente" der Vorstellung gleichen, Kreis, Formalursache, Notwendigkeit, materia

Textausschnitt: () The solution to this anomaly is the symbolic image, that is, the image that stands for things it does not resemble. The geometer boldly imagines blobs and bars but understands them and thinks of them as Euclidean points and lines. The geometer does not bother producing lines indefinitely; he produces them a bit but understands them and thinks of them as indefinitely produced. He can do this because in between his images and his understanding there intervene his definitions, which settle for understanding and thought what the images stand for, no matter what they resemble.
()
... why is this symbolically imagined uniformly round plane curve a circle?
()
The 'must' and 'cannot' reveal the activity of understanding; and what is understood is not how to use the name, circle, but circularity itself. Further, not only does understanding intervene, but it intervenes with respect to sensible data; the necessity results from the equality of all radii, but only sense knows a multiplicity of radii; the abstract radius is unique.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Introspektion, Amateur

Kurzinhalt: amateurhafte - wahre Introspektion, Irrtum d. Introspektion: Modell des Schauens

Textausschnitt: () What is this 'fallacy of amateurish introspection?' Based on what Lonergan will write in Insight, I would contend that it would be any attempt at introspection based on a model of knowing as 'taking a good look,' so that introspection is conceived as 'looking within ourselves.' Genuine introspection is the heightening of our human consciousness

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Wissensstreben

Kurzinhalt: desire to know, das reine Wissensstreben, Irrtum,

Textausschnitt: () Such a pure desire to know, Lonergan states, is the wonder prior to our questions. It is not inhibited by a lack of interest in understanding. Nor is it interested only up to a point and for the sake of something practical. There is to this pure desire a 'disinterestedness,' that characterizes genuine science. It reflects the unlimited character of our ability to question and our desire for the absoluteness of truth. Error results from the interference of inhibiting and reinforcing desires with this pure desire to know.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Konversion, radikal, Wissensstreben

Kurzinhalt: radikale Konversion, Ausdruck d. reinen Wissensstreben, Irrtum, Descartes

Textausschnitt: () Lonergan then makes a first approximation to explaining intellectual conversion by describing it as 'turning from what seems to what is.' Intellectual conversion is incidental if it is a turning 'from a particular error to a particular truth.
()
Intellectual conversion is radical if it makes explicit and deliberate the pure desire to know and it acknowledges the existence and influence of inhibiting and reinforcing desires. Radical intellectual conversion effects the transition from the spontaneous to the explicit and the deliberate. ... Thus, fidelity to the pure desire to know effectively combats other inhibiting or reinforcing desires.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Konversion, Folgen, Wissensstreben,

Kurzinhalt: radikale Konversion, Konsequenzen, explizite Selbstbejahung (self-affirmation), pure desire,

Textausschnitt: () Finally, Lonergan in the same notes describes the function of radical intellectual conversion. First, it is a bludgeon against obscurantism, stupidity, silliness. Psychologically, it pulls one out of the flow of percepts, the memories and anticipations added to data that come from the orientation of efficiently and economically dealing with one's environment. It pulls one out of what Lonergan will later call 'one's own little world. It pulls one out of the attitude that the world of sense is the criterion of reality; it pulls one away from deprecatory remarks about the 'bloodless ballet of categories'; it pulls one away from spontaneous utilitarianism and pragmatism. Positively, the function of radical intellectual conversion is to head us for 'whatever is intelligently conceived and reasonably affirmed.' It is related to Aquinas' 'natural desire to see God.'
()
In Insight all of these acts that constitute the content of the self-affirmation of the knower flow from the pure desire to know. To the extent that the pure desire to know is operative, it issues in these acts and this content of self-affirmation. In effect, it is what the 1951 notes call 'radical intellectual conversion': making explicit and deliberate the pure desire to know as the way of turning away from other inhibiting and reinforcing desires toward 'whatever is intelligently conceived and reasonably affirmed.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Konversion, Wissensstreben, Philosophie, Akt, Form, Potenz

Kurzinhalt: radikale Konversion, Anfagspunkt d. Philosophie, Relationen - Begriffe, Aristoteles vs. Leugner,

Textausschnitt: () ... 'the starting place of philosophy.' There he says that philosophy begins with the invitation to radical intellectual conversion. It takes any person where they are and invites them to advance toward whatever is intelligently grasped and reasonably affirmed. Philosophy cannot be based on the arbitrary decisions of each person; it must be scientific and, as such, based on a fundamental set of concepts and relations. Such a basic set of concepts and relations must be such that:
a) Relations fix concepts and concepts fix relations.
b) Relations are not free constructions as in mathematics but have experiential basis as in empirical sciences.
()
Between Act and Form. Act corresponds to the 'Yes' of judgment; it is what can be known only by the 'Yes.' Form corresponds to the intelligibility grasped and formulated by understanding.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Sein, Objekt, Objektivität, Wissensstreben, Konversion

Kurzinhalt: Sein <-> Objekt: äquivalent, Urteil, Brücke, distinctio, radikale Konversion; Sein: Ding - Ich; Ich-Ding-Unterscheidung -> Sein

Textausschnitt: () The pure notion of being is the pure desire to know inasmuch as it heads towards the absolutely universal and the absolutely concrete: ...
()
As Lonergan's early intellectual conversion was rooted in an understanding of the real distinction of essence and existence, so here he affirms the distinction within being of essence and existence:
()
Objectivity is rooted in the pure desire to know issuing in radical intellectual conversion:
()
an object is what is known in true judgment; hence 'object' and 'being' are equivalent terms. Lonergan rejects 'the problem of the bridge,' of getting from 'in here' to 'out there' as a false conception of the objectivity of human knowing:
()
Object is being; but differentiation of being from within; hence 'I' and 'thing' are known through differentiating 'being.'
Knowledge of real subject, real object, and real distinction is a set of judgments.
'I am' 'It is' 'I am not it' 'I make these judgments.'
()
As he had affirmed in Verbum, such transcendence is rooted in the fact that our intellect is a created participation in uncreated light.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Konverison, Konfrontationismus, Ursache, Mechanismus

Kurzinhalt: Schauen: Basis d. Konfrontationismus, Urteil als "Stempel", Identität - Dualismus, Mensch - Tier, Konfrontationismus - Irrtum

Textausschnitt: () The 'look' at the basis of confrontationism may be sensitive perception as in the various forms of empiricism, or some intellectual intuition that Kant sought for in vain and that naive realists dogmatically assert. It presupposes that human knowing is complete prior to judgment; judgment is merely affixing a rubber stamp on knowing as already complete. For confrontationism, knowledge is not primarily by identity between subject and object, a perfection in the subject, but dualistic: the object over against the subject.
()
The source of confrontationism is the fact that the human person is born an animal, and achieves animal integration spontaneously.
()
On the other hand, there is for the human person the possibility of another orientation: that is, toward the universe of being by means of the pure desire to know and radical intellectual conversion.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Konversion, Psychologie, Tier, Mensch, Realismus, kritisch, half animal,half human

Kurzinhalt: Erkenntnis: Mensch-Tier, half-animal, half-human; Descartes, Idealismus, Realismus, Therapie: Bejahung meiner als Erkennenden,

Textausschnitt: () The problem, as he describes it elsewhere, is that we develop as animals before we develop as human beings and consequently, from our earliest years, we confuse our properly human knowing with the knowing we share with other animals. The confusion between these two kinds of knowing is at the origin of the various schools of philosophy.
()
... that there are two quite different realisms, that there is an incoherent realism, half animal and half human, that poses as a half-way house between materialism and idealism and, on the other hand, that there is an intelligent and reasonable realism between which and materialism the half-way house is idealism.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Definition, Ding, Körper, Wissenschaft

Kurzinhalt: 'Already out There Now Real', Imagination-Einsicht, Körper: biologisches Bewusstsein (Katze, Milch), Ursache des Ding-Denkens, Hawking

Textausschnitt: () The key issue is the personal and systematic appropriation of the distinction between imagination and insight. () For the difficulty lies, not in either type of knowing by itself, but in the confusion that arises when one shifts unconsciously from one type to the other. Animals have no epistemological problems. Neither do scientists as long as they stick to their task of observing, forming hypotheses, and verifying. The perennial source of nonsense is that ...
()
The confusion of insight and visual imagination has been at the root of the disastrous interpretations of modern science during the last several centuries. But the development of modern classical and statistical science during the last several centuries has absolutely demanded this distinction.
()
By a 'body' is meant primarily a focal point of extroverted biological anticipation and attention. It is an 'already out there now real,' where these terms have their meanings fixed solely by elements within sensitive experience and so without any use of intelligent and reasonable questions and answers.
()
There are, then, two kinds of human knowing. One is a mixture of human knowing with the knowing we share with the higher animals; the other a distinctively human knowing. It adds understanding and, as we shall see, judgment, to human sensation and imagination.
()
but now we can see the origin of the strange urge to foist upon mankind unverifiable images. For both the scientist and the layman, besides being intelligent and reasonable, also are animals. To them as animals, a verified hypothesis is just a jumble of words or symbols. What they want is an elementary knowing of the 'really real,' if not through sense, at least by imagination.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Bewusstsein, Schauen, Introspektion, Ich

Kurzinhalt: Einheit von: Plato, Abstraktion, Thomas, Marechal, Kant; introspection, Bewusstsein: Selbstgegenwart auf verschiedenen Stufen

Textausschnitt: () What is meant by 'introspection'? Do we look into ourselves and intuit our inner being? To this, with more than a touch of irony, Lonergan replies: 'Hence, while some of our readers may possess the rather remarkable power of looking into themselves and intuiting things quite clearly and distinctly, we shall not base our case upon their success. For, after all, there may well exist other readers that, like the writer, find looking into themselves rather unrewarding.' As he says elsewhere: 'Thus if knowing is just looking, then knowing knowing will be looking at looking.'
()
On the contrary, human consciousness is not some kind of 'inner look.' It is, rather, our presence to ourselves on various levels that makes it possible to ask questions about our human knowing and deciding. ... 'To affirm consciousness is to affirm that cognitional process is not merely a procession of contents but also a succession of acts. It is to affirm that the acts differ radically from such unconscious acts as the metabolism of one's cells, the maintenance of one's organs, the multitudinous biological processes that one learns about through the study of contemporary medical science.'

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Selbsterkenntnis, Bejahung, Introspektion, Selbsterkenntnis, Selbstaneignung

Kurzinhalt: Selbstbejahung als eines Wissenden, Selbsterkenntnis-Bewusstsein, self-appropriation, Selbstannäherung, Revision

Textausschnitt: () Chapter eleven asks whether any true judgments occur and it attempts to meet the issue by asking whether I am a knower. The 'I' is the unity-identity-whole given in consciousness; a 'knower' is one who performs the operations investigated in the previous ten chapters; the reader is asked to find out for himself and in himself whether it is a virtually unconditioned that he is a knower.
()
Self-knowledge is the reduplicated structure: it is experience, understanding and judging with respect to experience, understanding and judging. Consciousness, on the other hand, is not knowing knowing but merely experience of knowing.
()
On this account all our cognitional acts can be conscious yet none or only some may be known. Thus, most people know what seeing is, but are mystified when asked what understanding is. They do not know themselves as understanding, still less as judging.
()
... it can be solid and fruitful only by being painstaking and slow.' Several times in his writings Lonergan mentioned the many years John Henry Newman took to find his intellectual way to becoming a Roman Catholic. His own intellectual conversion took many years. It is indeed a painstaking and slow process. Insight was written to facilitate that process.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Metaphysik, Konversion, Position, Gegenposition, Potenz, Form, Akt

Kurzinhalt: position, counter-position (Descartes, Hobbes, Hume), Kriterien d. Position, Physik-Metaphysik, Insight: Zusammenfassung

Textausschnitt: () A basic position in metaphysics will be arrived at '1) if the real is the concrete universe of being and not a subdivision of the 'already out there now'; 2) if the subject becomes known when it affirms itself intelligently and reasonably and so is not known yet in any prior 'existential' state; and 3) if objectivity is conceived as a consequence of intelligent inquiry and critical reflection, and not as a property of vital anticipation, extroversion and satisfaction.' On the other hand, it will be a basic counter-position if it contradicts one or more of the basic positions:
()
... potency, form and act?' He answers simply: 'They express the structure in which one knows what proportionate being is; they outline the mould in which an understanding of proportionate being necessarily will flow; they arise from understanding and they regard proportionate being, not as understood, but only as to be understood.' There follows a very important corollary: 'If one wants to know just what forms are, the proper procedure is to give up metaphysics and turn to the sciences ...
()
... Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you will possess a fixed base, an invariant pattern, opening upon all further developments of understanding.

Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Philosophie, Konversion, Sorge, Insight, Thomas

Kurzinhalt: spezielle philosophische Konversion, kleine Welt - Standard (wahres Urteil), homo sensibilibus immersus -> homo maxime est mens hominis

Textausschnitt: () ... two meanings of 'the real world.' On the one hand, it can mean the universe of being to be known by the totality of true judgments. On the other hand, it can mean 'one's own little world': 'In this sense each of us lives in a real world of his own. Its contents are determined by his Sorge, by his interests and concerns, by the orientation of his living, by the unconscious horizon that blocks from his view the rest of reality.' This horizon of 'one's own little world' plays a powerful role in shaping one's consciousness.
()
To each of us his own private real world is very real indeed. Spontaneously it lays claim to being the one real world, the standard, the criterion, the absolute, by which everything is judged, measured, evaluated. That claim, I should insist, is not to be admitted. There is one standard, one criterion, one absolute, and that is true judgment. Insofar as one's private real world does not meet that standard, it is some dubious product of animal faith and human error. On the other hand, insofar as one's private world is submitted constantly and sedulously to the corrections made by true judgment, necessarily it is brought into conformity with the universe of being.