Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Insight

Titel: Insight

Stichwort: Moralische Impotenz; dreifache Befangenheit

Kurzinhalt: Now, as has been seen, common sense is subject to a threefold bias. Accordingly, we can expect that individual decisions will be likely to suffer from individual bias, ...

Textausschnitt: 651a Now, as has been seen, common sense is subject to a threefold bias. Accordingly, we can expect that individual decisions will be likely to suffer from individual bias, that common decisions will be likely to suffer from the various types of group bias, and that all decisions will be likely to suffer from general bias. There will result conflicts between the individual and the group, between economic and national groups within the state, and between states. But far more significant than these relatively superficial and overt conflicts will be the underlying opposition that general bias sets up between the decisions that intelligence and reasonableness would demand and the actual decisions, individual and common, that are made. For this opposition is both profound and unnoticed. As individuals, so societies fail to distinguish sharply and accurately between positions and counterpositions. As individuals, so societies fail to reach the universal willingness that reflects and sustains the detachment and disinterestedness of the unrestricted desire to know. More or less automatically and unconsciously, each successive batch of possible and practical courses of action is screened to eliminate as unpractical whatever does not seem practical to an intelligence and a willingness that not only are developed imperfectly but also suffer from bias. But the social situation is the cumulative product of individual and group decisions, and as these decisions depart from the demands of intelligence and reasonableness, so the social situation becomes, like the complex number, a compound of the rational and irrational. Then if it is to be understood, it must be met by a parallel compound of direct and inverse insights, of direct insights that grasp its intelligibility and of inverse insights that grasp its lack of intelligibility. Nor is it enough to understand the situation; it must also be managed. Its intelligible components have to be encouraged towards fuller development; and its unintelligible components have to be hurried to their reversal. (Fs)

652a Still, this is only the outer aspect of the problem. Just as the social situation with its objective surd proceeds from minds and wills that oscillate between the positions and the counterpositions, so too it constitutes the materials for their practical insights, the conditions to be taken into account in their reflection, the reality to be maintained and developed by their decisions. Just as there are philosophies that take their stand upon the positions and urge the development of the intelligible components in the situation and the reversal of the unintelligible components, so too there are counterphilosophies that take their stand upon the counterpositions, that welcome the unintelligible components in the situation as objective facts that provide the empirical proof of their views, that demand the further expansion of the objective surd, and that clamor for the complete elimination of the intelligible components that they regard as wicked survivals of antiquated attitudes. But philosophies and counterphilosophies are for the few. Like Mercutio, the average man imprecates a plague on both their houses. What he wants is peace and prosperity. By his own light he selects what he believes is the intelligent and reasonable but practical course of action; and as that practicality is the root of the trouble, the civilization drifts through successive less comprehensive syntheses to the sterility of the objectively unintelligible situation and to the coercion of economic pressures, political forces, and psychological conditioning. (Fs)

652b Clearly, both the outward conditions and the inner mentality prevalent in social decline intensify to the point of desperation the tension, inherent in all development but conscious in man, between limitation and transcendence. One can agree with Christian praise of charity, with Kant's affirmation that the unqualified good is the good will, with existentialist exhortations to genuineness. But good will is never better than the intelligence and reasonableness that it implements. Indeed, when proposals and programs only putatively are intelligent and reasonable, then the good will that executes them so faithfully and energetically is engaged really in the systematic imposition of ever further evils on the already weary shoulders of mankind. And who will tell which proposals and programs truly are intelligent and reasonable, and which are not? For the only transition from the analytic proposition to the analytic principle is through concrete judgments of fact, and alas, the facts are ambivalent. The objective situation is all fact, but partly it is the product of intelligence and reasonableness, and partly it is the product of aberration from them. The whole of man is all fact, but it also is malleable, polymorphic fact. No doubt, a subtle and protracted analysis can bring to light the components in that polymorphic fact and proceed to a dialectical criticism of any proposal or program. But to whom does it bring the light? To how many? How clearly and how effectively? Are philosophers to be kings or kings to learn philosophy? Are they to rule in the name of wisdom subjects judged incapable of wisdom? Are all the members of our democracies to be philosophers? Is there to be a provisional dictatorship while they are learning philosophy? (Fs)