Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Third Collection

Titel: A Third Collection

Stichwort: Dialektik der Geschichte; Naturrecht; Entwicklung auf verschiedenen Ebenen; Vorherbestimmung

Kurzinhalt: Again, as always, emancipation has its root in self-transcendence. But in the contemporary context it is such self-transcendence as includes an intellectual, a moral, and an affective conversion. As intellectual, this conversion draws a sharp ...

Textausschnitt: 31/11 First, human meaning develops in human collaboration. There is the expansion of technical meanings as human ingenuity advances from the spears of hunters and the nets of fishers to the industrial complexes of the twentieth century. There is the expansion of social meanings in the evolution of domestic, economic, and political arrangements. There is the expansion of cultural meanings as people reflect on their work, their interpersonal relationships, and the meaning of human life. (176f; Fs)

32/11 Secondly, such expansions occur on a succession of plateaus. The basic forward thrust has to do with doing, and it runs from primitive fruit gatherers to the wealth and power of the ancient high civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and other lands. Development then is mainly of practical intelligence, and its style is the spontaneous accumulation of insights into the ways of nature and the affairs of men. There also is awareness of the cosmos, of reality being more than nature and man, but this awareness has little more than symbolic expression in the compact style of undifferentiated consciousness. (177; Fs)

33/11 An intermediate forward thrust has to do mainly with speech. Poets and orators, prophets and wise men, bring about a development of language and a specialization of attention that prepare the way for sophists and philosophers, mathematicians and scientists. There occurs a differentiation of consciousness, as writing makes language an object for the eye as well as the ear; grammarians organize the inflections of words and analyze the construction of sentences; orators learn and teach the art of persuasion; logicians go behind sentences to propositions and behind persuasion to proofs; and philosophers exploit this second-level use of language to the point where they develop technical terms for speaking compendiously about anything that can be spoken about; while the more modest mathematicians confine their technical utterances to relations of identity or equivalence between individuals and sets; and similarly the scientists have their several specialized languages for each of their various fields. (177; Fs)

34/11 On a third plateau attention shifts beyond developments in doing and in speaking to developments generally. Its central concern is with human understanding where developments originate, with the methods in natural science and in critical history which chart the course of discovery, and more fundamentally with the generalized empirical method that underpins both scientific and historical method to supply philosophy with a basic cognitional theory, an epistemology, and by way of a corollary with a metaphysics of proportionate being. (177; Fs)

35/11 On this plateau logic loses its key position to become but a modest part within method; and logical concern-with truth, with necessity, with demonstration, with universality-enjoys no more than marginal significance. Science and history become ongoing processes, asserting not necessity but verifiable possibility, claiming not certitude but probability. Where science, as conceived on the second plateau, ambitioned permanent validity but remained content with abstract universality, science and history on the third plateau offer no more than the best available opinion of the time, yet by sundry stratagems and devices endeavor to approximate ever more accurately to the manifold details and nuances of the concrete. (178; Fs)

36/11 These differences in plateau are not without significance for the very notion of a dialectic of history. The notion of fate or destiny or again of divine providence pertains to the first plateau. It receives a more detailed formulation on the second plateau when an Augustine contrasts the city of God with the earthly city, or when a Hegel or a Marx set forth their idealistic or materialistic systems on what history has been or is to be. A reversal towards the style of the first plateau may be suspected in Spengler's biological analogy, while a preparation for the style of the third plateau may be discerned in Toynbee's A Study of History. For that study can be viewed, not as an exercise in empirical method, but as the prolegomena to such an exercise, as a formulation of ideal types that would stand to broad historical investigations as mathematics stands to physics.1 (178; Fs)

37/11 In any case the dialectic of history, as we are conceiving it, has its origin in the tensions of adult human consciousness, its unfolding in the actual course of events, its significance in the radical analysis it provides, its practical utility in the invitation it will present to collective consciousness to understand and repudiate the waywardness of its past and to enlighten its future with the intelligence, the reasonableness, the responsibility, the love demanded by natural right. (178; Fs) (notabene)

38/11 Our third topic is the ideal proper to the third plateau. Already in the eighteenth century it was anticipated in terms of enlightenment and emancipation. But then inevitably enough enlightenment was conceived in the well-worn concepts and techniques of the second plateau; and the notion of emancipation was, not a critique of tradition, but rather the project of replacing traditional backwardness by the rule of pure reason. (178; Fs)

38/11 Subsequent centuries have brought forth the antitheses to the eighteenth-century thesis. The unique geometry of Euclid has yielded to the Riemannian manifold. Newtonian science has been pushed around by Maxwell, Einstein, Heisenberg to modify not merely physics but the very notion of modern science. Concomitant with this transformation has been the even more radical transformation in human studies. Man is to be known not only in his nature but also in his historicity, not only philosophically but also historically, not only abstractly but also concretely. (178f; Fs)

39/11 Such is the context within which we have to conceive enlightenment and emancipation, not indeed as if they were novelties for they have been known all along, but in the specific manner appropriate to what I have named the third plateau. As always enlightenment is a matter of the ancient precept, Know thyself. But in the contemporary context it aims to be such self-awareness, such self-understanding, such self-knowledge, as to grasp the similarities and the differences of common sense, science, and history, to grasp the foundations of these three in interiority which also founds natural right and, beyond all knowledge of knowledge, to give also knowledge of affectivity in its threefold manifestation of love in the family, loyalty in the community, and faith in God. (179; Fs)

40/11 Again, as always, emancipation has its root in self-transcendence. But in the contemporary context it is such self-transcendence as includes an intellectual, a moral, and an affective conversion. As intellectual, this conversion draws a sharp distinction between the world of immediacy and the world mediated by meaning, between the criteria appropriate to operations in the former and, on the other hand, the criteria appropriate to operations in the latter.2 Next, as moral, it acknowledges a distinction between satisfactions and values, and it is committed to values even where they conflict with satisfactions. Finally, as affective, it is commitment to love in the home, loyalty in the community, faith in the destiny of man. (179; Fs)