Autor: Stebbins, J. Michael

Buch: The Divine Initiative

Titel: The Divine Initiative

Stichwort: Entwicklung des Verstehehens: intelligere multa per unum; discursus, ratiocinando; ordo cognoscendi (essendi); ratiocinatio; Abstraktion

Kurzinhalt: synthesis: one thing in another; rational - intellectual (human beings, angels); abstraction: adds to, rather than subtracts from;

Textausschnitt: 43/1 Furthermore, because our intellectual light is a created participation in the light of divine understanding, the desire to know impels us towards just this kind of synthesis: (18; Fs) (notabene)
[I]t is to such a [synthetic] view of all reality that human intellect naturally aspires. The specific drive of our nature is to understand, and indeed to understand everything, neither confusing the trees with the forest nor content to contemplate the forest without seeing all the trees. For the spirit of inquiry within us never calls a halt, never can be satisfied, until our intellects, united to God as body to soul, know ipsum intelligere and through that vision, though then knowing aught else is a trifle, contemplate the universe as well.
44/1 Thus, synthesis is the content of an act of direct understanding that grasps one thing in another rather than one thing from another; one understands both the whole and its parts without detriment to the understanding of either, for one grasps the parts precisely as in the whole (V:54-55). (18; Fs) (notabene)
45/1 Because we have to begin from the presentations of sense, the attainment of synthesis does not come immediately or automatically for humans. We advance gradually from understanding one thing to understanding another, a process that Aquinas calls 'reasoning' (ratiocinatio) or 'discourse' (discursus). We do not grasp essences immediately or intuitively; instead, we reach an understanding of causes only through a consideration of their effects, or of natures through a consideration of their properties (V:§6). Aquinas's introspective method is a case in point: we can determine what the human soul is only by reasoning from the objects of human acts to the acts themselves, from the acts to the potencies actualized by the acts, from the potencies to the essence in which the potencies inhere. It is otherwise for angels, who possess the fullness of intellectual light. When they grasp an intelligible species, they grasp it immediately and, simultaneously, know without reasoning everything that can be known in it, that is, every conclusion that could be drawn from it by reasoning. Thus, says Aquinas, angels are called intellectual beings because they understand principles and implications at a glance, seeing effects in causes and causes in effects, while human souls are called rational because they attain knowledge through discursive thought. (18f; Fs)