Autor: Stebbins, J. Michael

Buch: The Divine Initiative

Titel: The Divine Initiative

Stichwort: Das innere Wort: Produkt des rationalen Bewusstseins; Ratio als Wirkursache des inneren Wortes; imago Dei

Kurzinhalt: Any effect has a sufficient ground in its cause; but an inner word not merely has a sufficient ground in ...;

Textausschnitt: 36/1 A brief aside is in order. I have taken care to stress that concepts and judgments are both inner words, not out of some misplaced concern to respect the niceties of Aquinas's language but rather because it is in the expressing (dicere) of an inner word {verbum) by and from an act of understanding (intelligere), whether direct or reflective, that human knowing most evidently reveals itself precisely as rational. The expression of an inner word is an 'intelligible emanation,' that is, an act that is intelligible because it is intelligent: (15; Fs)

Any effect has a sufficient ground in its cause; but an inner word not merely has a sufficient ground in the act of understanding it expresses; it also has a knowing as sufficient ground, and that ground is operative precisely as a knowing, knowing itself to be sufficient. To introduce a term that will summarize this, we may say that the inner word is rational, not indeed with the derived rationality of discourse, of reasoning from premises to conclusions, but with the basic and essential rationality of rational consciousness, with the rationality that can be discerned in any judgment, with the rationality that now we have to observe in all concepts. For human understanding, though it has its object in the phantasm and knows it in the phantasm, yet is not content with an object in this state. It pivots on itself to produce for itself another object which is the inner word as ratio, intentio, definitio, quod quid est. And this pivoting and production is no mere matter of some metaphysical sausage-machine, at one end slicing species off phantasm, and at the other popping out concepts; it is an operation of rational consciousness. (V:34)