Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Collection: Papers bei B. Lonergan

Titel: Collection: Papers bei B. Lonergan

Stichwort: Unterschied: Subjekt - Substanz; Drifter

Kurzinhalt: The first distinction is between substance and subject; drifter

Textausschnitt: The Subject

222c
1 The first distinction is between substance and subject.g When one is sound asleep, one is actually a substance and only potentially a subject. To be a subject, one at least must dream. But the dreamer is only the minimal subject: one is more a subject when one is awake, still more when one is actively intelligent, still more when one actively is reasonable, still more in one's deliberations and decisions when one actively is responsible and free. (Fs)

223a Of the human substance it is true that human nature is always the same; a man is a man whether he is awake or asleep, young or old, sane or crazy, sober or drunk, a genius or a moron, a saint or a sinner. From the viewpoint of substance, those differences are merely accidental. But they are not accidental to the subject, for the subject is not an abstraction; he is a concrete reality, all of him, a being in the luminousness of being. (Fs)

223b Substance prescinds from the difference between the opaque being that is merely substance and the luminous beingh that is conscious. Subject denotes the luminous being. (Fs)

223c
2 The being of the subject is becoming. One becomes oneself. When I was a child, I was a subject; but I had not yet reached the use of reason; I was not expected to be able to draw reasonably the elementary distinctions between right and wrong, true and false. When I was a boy, I was a subject; but I was a minor; I had not reached the degree of freedom and responsibility that would make me accountable before the law. The self I am today is not numerically different from the self I was as a child or boy; yet it is qualitatively different. Were it not, you would not be listening to me. Were you yourselves not, I would not be talking to you in this way. (Fs)

223d
3 The subject has more and more to do with his own becoming. When an adult underestimates a child's development and tries to do for the child what the child can do for itself, the child will resent the interference and exclaim, 'Let me do it.' Development is a matter of increasing the number of things that one does for oneself, that one decides for oneself, that one finds out for oneself. Parents and teachers and professors and superiors let people do more and more for themselves, decide more and more for themselves, find out more and more for themselves. (Fs)

223e
4 There is a critical point in the increasing autonomy of the subject. It is reached when the subject finds out for himself that it is up to himself to decide what he is to make of himself.i At first sight doing for oneself, deciding for oneself, finding out for oneself, are busy with objects. But on reflection it appears that deeds, decisions, discoveries affect the subject more deeply than they affect the objects with which they are concerned. They accumulate as dispositions and habits of the subject; they determine him; they make him what he is and what he is to be. (Fs)

223f The self in the first period makes itself; but in a second period this making oneself is open-eyed, deliberate. Autonomy decides what autonomy is to be. (Fs)

224a The opposite to this open-eyed, deliberate self-control is drifting. The drifter has not yet found himself; he has not yet discovered his own deed, and so is content to do what everyone else is doing; he has not yet discovered his own will, and so he is content to choose what everyone else is choosing; he has not yet discovered a mind of his own, and so he is content to think and say what everyone else is thinking and saying; and the others too are apt to be drifters, each of them doing and choosing and thinking and saying what others happen to be doing, choosing, thinking, saying. (Fs)
224b I have spoken of an opposite to drifting, of autonomy disposing of itself, of open-eyed, deliberate self-control. But I must not misrepresent. We do not know ourselves very well; we cannot chart the future; we cannot control our environment completely or the influences that work on us; we cannot explore our unconscious and preconscious mechanisms. Our course is in the night; our control is only rough and approximate; we have to believe and trust, to risk and dare. (Fs)

224c
5 In this life the critical point is never transcended. It is one thing to decide what one is to make of oneself: a Catholic, a religious, a Jesuit, a priest. It is another to execute the decision. Today's resolutions do not predetermine the free choice of tomorrow, of next week or next year, of ten years from now. What has been achieved is always precarious: it can slip, fall, shatter. What is to be achieved can be ever expanding, deepening. To meet one challenge is to effect a development that reveals a further and graver challenge. (Fs)