Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Insight

Titel: Insight

Stichwort: Moralische Impotenz; positiver, negativer Aspekt

Kurzinhalt: To assert moral impotence is to assert that man's effective freedom is restricted ... in the profound fashion that follows from incomplete intellectual and volitional development.

Textausschnitt: 650a To assert moral impotence is to assert that man's effective freedom is restricted, not in the superficial fashion that results from external circumstance or psychic abnormality, but in the profound fashion that follows from incomplete intellectual and volitional development. For when that development is incomplete, there are practical insights that could be had if a man took time out to acquire the necessary preparatory insights, and there are courses of action that would be chosen if a man took time out to persuade himself to willingness. There follows a gap between the proximate effective freedom he actually possesses and, on the other hand, the remote and hypothetical effective freedom that he would possess if certain conditions happened to be fulfilled. Now this gap measures one's moral impotence. For complete self-development is a long and difficult process. During that process one has to live and make decisions in the light of one's undeveloped intelligence and under the guidance of one's incomplete willingness. And the less developed one is, the less one appreciates the need of development and the less one is willing to take time out for one's intellectual and moral education. (Fs)

650b Moreover, as the scotosis of the dramatic subject, so the moral impotence of the essentially free subject is neither grasped with perfect clarity nor totally unconscious.i For if one were to represent a man's field of freedom as a circular area, then one would distinguish a luminous central region in which he was effectively free, a surrounding penumbra in which his uneasy conscience keeps suggesting that he could do better if only he would make up his mind, and finally an outer shadow to which he barely if ever adverts. Further, these areas are not fixed; as he develops, the penumbra penetrates into the shadow and the luminous area into the penumbra while, inversely, moral decline is a contraction of the luminous area and of the penumbra. Finally, this consciousness of moral impotence not only heightens the tension between limitation and transcendence but also can provide ambivalent materials for reflection; correctly interpreted, it brings home to man the fact that his living is a developing, that he is not to be discouraged by his failures, that rather he is to profit by them both as lessons on his personal weaknesses and as a stimulus to greater efforts; but the same data can also be regarded as evidence that there is no use trying, that moral codes ask the impossible, that one has to be content with oneself as one is. (Fs) (notabene)

650c This inner tension and its ambivalence are reflected and heightened in the social sphere. For rational self-consciousness demands consistency between knowing and doing not only in the individual but also in the common concerns of the group. To the ethics of the individual conscience there is added an ethical transformation of the home, of the technological expansion, of the economy, and of the polity. But just as individual intelligence and individual reasonableness lead to the individual decisions that may be right or wrong, so too common intelligence and common reasonableness lead to common decisions that may be right or wrong. Moreover, in both cases, decisions are right not because they are the pronouncements of the individual conscience, nor because they proceed from this or that type of social mechanism for reaching common decisions, but because they are in the concrete situation intelligent and reasonable. Again, in both cases, decisions are wrong, not because of their private or public origin, but because they diverge from the dictates of intelligence and reasonableness. (Fs)