Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Topics in Education

Titel: Topics in Education

Stichwort: Tertullian: Beispiel für infantile Auffassung von Realität: nur Körper sind real; Augustinus: veritas, Piaget

Kurzinhalt: Tertullian: God has to be a body-not a body such as we see and feel, but still a body; Augustine: discovery of the limitations of the infantile apprehension of reality

Textausschnitt: 29/7 Now the notion of reality formed in that manner is of the same elementary order as the kinesthetic-tactile notion of space. And quite clearly, if one holds that that is reality, then the operations of the mathematician and of the natural scientist that arise within the intellectual pattern of experience and form the enormous structures that refer to a world quite different from the world for us, a world rather of things in their relations to one another, give rise to an unreal world. Such knowing is just hypothesis. It becomes knowledge of reality insofar as you can get back to what you can deal with, what you can see with your eyes, handle with your hands, feel to be hot or cold, rough or smooth, wet or dry, heavy or light. Then the real is simply the aisthiton, the sensibile, what is given to sense. All the rest is instrumental, as Dewey would say. It is immanent, an activity of the subject. It is not knowing reality. It may help you to deal with the reality that is given to sense, but in itself it is not knowing. Activities of understanding help one, they are useful, but they are not knowing. And still less is judgment knowing. Judgment is just putting a rubber stamp upon these activities of understanding. When the scholastics held that the real, ens, is id quod est, where est is said of what you know when you make the judgment 'It is,' they were not talking about reality at all. They were caught up in a verbalism. To throw any doubts upon the convictions about reality formed in infancy is to be an idealist, a Platonist, a Kantian, a relativist, or God knows what. In any case, it is certainly getting out of this real world. (169f; Fs)
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30/7 We have here a case in which the notion of the real develops, and we have in patristic literature two brilliant instances of this. For Tertullian, only bodies are real. God has to be a body-not a body such as we see and feel, but still a body. What is not a body is not real. This is an expression of the survival of the infantile view of reality. Similarly, StAugustine, who was a man of extraordinary intelligence, was for years a materialist. He knew he was a materialist, and he said so. But he changed. And then when he wanted to talk about the real, what is really so, what word did he use? Veritas. Augustine does not talk about realitas, but about veritas, about what is true. And the truth is known not without, non foras, and not just within, non intus, but above us, in a light that he describes as incommutable and eternal. The history of Augustine's thought is the history of the discovery of the limitations of the infantile apprehension of reality and the history of the shift to the true. (170; Fs)