Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Topics in Education

Titel: Topics in Education

Stichwort: Basic levels of conscious operations; Sorokin, values; positions - counterpositions

Kurzinhalt: the 3 basic levels of conscious operations: the experiential, the intellectual, and the rational or reflective; living can be organized more on the level of experience, or more on the level of intelligence, or more on the level of rational reflection

Textausschnitt: 54/7 Let us begin with the three basic levels of conscious operations: the experiential, the intellectual, and the rational or reflective. The three basic types of philosophy are organized, respectively, about the level of experience, about the level of intelligence, and about the level of rational reflection. (178; Fs) (notabene)
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55/7 De facto, in artistic and literary work the experiential level is most prominent, in mathematical and scientific work the intellectual is most prominent, and in philosophical work the rational and reflective is most prominent. Because rational reflection leads to saying A is, A is B, or A is not C, philosophy can be very jejune. And that is no harm. But that is the controlling level of the other two. Acts of understanding are much rarer than acts of experiencing, and acts of judging are much rarer than acts of understanding. ... You can deal with insights that are all X's, but the philosopher's emphasis is on the 'is' or 'is not.' (178; Fs)
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56/7 However, men in their living can be organized more on the level of experience, or more on the level of intelligence, or more on the level of rational reflection; and so there arise three basic classes of philosophy. The tendency to organize on the experiential level is manifest in the materialist, the empiricist, the sensist, the positivist, the pragmatist, the modernist. These same types of philosophy recur throughout the whole history of philosophy. There are differences in the experiential philosophies due to different objects of intellectual interest, but they are all of that basic type. On the second level, there are the philosophies of the Platonist, idealist, relativist, essentialist varieties. On the third level, there are the realists, where what is meant by the real is what is known when one truly affirms, 'It is.' As St Thomas said, for example, we know the existence of God when we know the truth of the proposition Deus est, God is. (178; Fs)
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57/7 Now these philosophic differences will radiate through the whole of life. Earlier, we considered three levels of the good: the particular good (the level of satisfactions), the good of order, and value. We distinguished aesthetic, ethical, and religious values, where the aesthetic value is apprehended by insight into the concrete, the ethical value is the individual demanding correspondence between his rationality and his activity, and the religious value is the rational individual using truth to know being, orientating himself before God within the world and history. The distinction of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious comes, of course, from Kierkegaard. He used the three categories in speaking of three spheres of existential subjectivity. A person moves from one sphere to another only by a leap. In other words, when a person is within a given sphere of existential subjectivity, as Kierkegaard would put it, or within a given horizon, to use the terminology that we developed earlier, then it is not by arguing from that sphere that one will bring him to another sphere. That sphere becomes a closed system, and a person has to be dynamited out of it. We then related to this distinction of operations Sorokin's analysis of Western culture in terms of three types of cultures or civilizations. There are the sensate, corresponding to the experiential; the idealistic, corresponding to the intellectual; and the ideational, corresponding to the reflective, the 'It is.' Consequently, meeting those fundamental types is the approach implied in Insight in the distinction between positions and counterpositions. Fundamentally, positions are philosophic, ethical, artistic, practical views that are in harmony with the full implications of the three levels. Counterpositions are views, whether philosophic, ethical, practical, or artistic, that involve a blind spot, a limited horizon, where the limitation is either to the intellectual level or to the experiential level. The systematic formulation of the difference between positions and counterpositions is given in epistemological terms: if the real is what you know by understanding correctly, you have a position; if the real is anything but that, or if no real at all is acknowledged, you have a counterposition. (179f; Fs)