Autor: Stebbins, J. Michael

Buch: The Divine Initiative

Titel: The Divine Initiative

Stichwort: 2. Tätigkeit des Verstandes: an sit; resolutio in principia; lumen intellectus (Prinzipien); inneres Wort: Urteil

Kurzinhalt: The Second Operation: Reflective Understanding; this act of understanding yields an inner word that is not a concept but a judgment; 'intelligible emanation';

Textausschnitt: 31/1 Our movement towards knowledge shifts into this next phase when our wonder, now operating in a critical or reflective mode, transforms the concept from a mere possibility into a something-to-be-verified, just as it previously transformed the phantasm we were considering from mere data into a something-to-be-understood. Instead of being content with a bright idea, we pose a further question: Is the intelligibility grasped in our act of direct understanding the same as the intelligibility of the real thing that is the terminal object of our inquiry? This is the second of Aquinas's questions, an sit. We reach an answer to this question through the occurrence of an act of reflective (rather than direct) understanding, which consists in grasping whether or not there is sufficient evidence to verify that the conceptual content expressed by our direct understanding does indeed explain the actually existing thing that we seek to know. (14; Fs)

32/1 Aquinas speaks of verification as involving a resolutio in principia (a resolving of something to its principles) whereby we return to the two remote sources of our insight: our innate intellectual light, which I shall discuss shortly, and the data of sense. The immediate object of our inquiry is a phantasm, a schematic image that we form in order to represent what we take to be the significant elements of the data. Lonergan contends that insights into phantasm, as well as their consequent conceptual expressions, are in themselves unerring: (14; Fs)

No one misunderstands things as he imagines them: for insight into phantasm to be erroneous either one must fancy what is not or else fail to imagine what is; of itself, per se, apart from errors in imagining, insight is infallible; and, were that not so, one would not expect to correct misunderstandings by pointing out what has been overlooked or by correcting what mistakenly has been fancied. (V:176)

33/1 The point of returning to the data of sense, therefore, is to ensure that the phantasm that we have understood and whose essence we have defined is in fact an adequate representation of the sense data on the actually existing thing that is the ultimate object of our inquiry. Archimedes' insight, for instance, can be checked experimentally by immersing different pure metals or known alloys in water and verifying that there is a uniform correlation between the mass of the metal and the volume of water displaced. If the expected intelligibilities are found to be immanent in the data, then the evidence suggests the correctness of our insight. If they are not, then the fault lies not in our insight but in our failure to isolate some or all of the relevant aspects of the data, and we must continue our search for understanding, this time with an altered phantasm: back to the drawing board! (14f; Fs)

34/1 But sense data are not the only source of understanding; there is also what Aquinas calls the lumen intellectus (in Lonergan's rendering, 'intellectual light'), which is 'constitutive of our very power of understanding.' It cannot be known in its pure state; it always manifests itself as something (V:89). It is especially evident in our knowledge of first principles, a fact that bears directly upon our knowledge of the real as real (V:80-81). For every act of human understanding depends on the occurrence of some prior act of understanding. But the series of these acts is not an infinite regress, for we understand certain first principles that are naturally known; Aquinas frequently cites as examples our knowledge that a thing cannot both be and not-be, or that the whole is greater than the part. Why do we assent to first principles? Because they express the very meaning of intelligence and intelligibility, and hence the very nature of the human mind itself. Thus, in any instance of knowing we appeal ultimately to the innate power of our own minds to know the real. (15; Fs)