Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958-1964

Titel: Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958-1964

Stichwort: "Philosophie von []" (philosophy of []); Philosophie als Liebe zur Weisheit; kein statisches System (geistiges Auge, Universalien); Thomas von Aquin; kein Ausgang von Axiomen, sondern von Grundoperationen

Kurzinhalt: If anyone reads St Thomas, one notices no similarity to Euclidean procedure. He does not start from a set of definitions and axioms,

Textausschnitt: 66b I began with history as a subject, and spoke of occasional history, technical history, explanatory history; now we will move to the topic 'philosophy of [...]' (Fs)

67a One is asked traditionally to think of philosophy absolutely; philosophy is something, it is not of something else; philosophy is logic or epistemology or ontology or psychology or cosmology or ethics or natural theology or preferably all put together; but it is that and nothing more nor less. What is this 'philosophy of ...'? Philosophy of history is one member of a species or genus. There is philosophy of nature, philosophy of science, philosophy of spirit, philosophy of man, philosophy of law, philosophy of religion, philosophy of education, philosophy of art, philosophy of history. What is this 'philosophy of [...]'? (Fs)

67b It is a question that can be given a general answer very easily in traditional terms. Philosophy, as one case of a very explicit and deliberate etymology, means love of wisdom. It is a modest reply to the assertiveness of the Sophists, who proposed to hand out wisdom, while the philosophers had a lot more but did not think that they had got there yet. Wisdom is the ordering of all. And because it is an apprehension of universal order, it is also a potentiality of ultimate judgment. A judgment on anything has to take into account everything that is relevant to that point; and consequently ultimate judgments have to take into account everything. Hence wisdom is a principle not only of universal order but also of ultimate judgment. But while wisdom as such is concerned with universal order and ultimate judgment, still it will, of its very nature, have application to particular fields. Precisely because it is universal and ultimate, it will have its participation in such fields as science, nature, spirit, art, law, education, religion, history; and so you have this 'philosophy of [...]' (Fs)

67c The general answer is one thing, and the technique of setting up a 'philosophy of [...],' a philosophy that is so conceived that it automatically becomes a 'philosophy of [...],' is quite another. Philosophy can be misconceived, I would say, as a dam across the river of life and thought, rather than the bed in which the river flows. What seems to me to have provoked that view of philosophy arises from taking the easy way of conceiving one's own intellect, one's own intelligence,1 pretty much in the same way as one comes to know God. You know the methodological procedure in natural theology of coming to the concept of God. It begins from the effects and proceeds by a method of analogy, of affirmation, negation, and eminence, to a concept of God. Man can proceed in exactly the same way to knowledge of his intelligence. There are the effects of intelligence in the sciences (sciences in the sense of written books of science), in the use of common names, in intelligent products. And from that one goes on, proceeding on the analogy that just as with our eyes we see, so there is a spiritual eye. If we use common names, this spiritual eye looks at universals. And since we have general principles, well, the spiritual eye sees the connections between these universals. When it sees those connections, you have a universal and necessary truth of which you are absolutely certain. While particular people might not be certain about it, still per se it is certain. And while these truths, since they are universal and necessary, hold for all possible worlds, still there may be very many qualifications to be added on. Yet per se they are true, and their being true is not the being true which is formaliter in iudicio, something that is in the mind; rather the truths are out there too. Finally, there is the notion of system as a deduction from a set of principles. What system? Well, something like Euclid's Elements. You lay down axioms as definitions, and then you proceed to deduce. If philosophy is conceived in that manner, it is going to be extremely difficult to get the type of wisdom that finds its applications in particular fields. (Fs)

68a Let me handle very briefly the notion of a system.2 If anyone reads St Thomas, one notices no similarity to Euclidean procedure. He does not start from a set of definitions and axioms, and he never treats any question by giving one proof and writing the matter off with Quod erat demonstrandum. Rather, he sets up an ordered series of questions, and in the Summa theologiae he subdivides the questions into articles. In a work like the Summa contra Gentiles, in his ordered set of topics, he brings to bear on each, not just one argument but several, and sometimes approximately twenty, and the arguments are all different; but when you move to the next question, well, it is pretty much the same arguments coming up again in a somewhat different application, and so on. Now St Thomas is systematic. Of what does his system consist? It consists of a basic set of operations that can be combined and recombined in various ways, and the various combinations are able to handle all the questions that arise. We have here, then, a concept, a notion, of system that is something far less static and abstract than Euclidean deduction. Moreover, it is a notion of system that can be applied to very concrete, very human developments. It is the fundamental notion of Piaget's some twenty volumes on child psychology.3 Now, if you conceive system this way - a man has a system, he is thinking systematically, he is reaching systematic knowledge, insofar as he possesses a basic set of related operations - then, because the operations are related, the terms, the products, of the operations will be related. Because the operations are related to one another, the operations can be combined in various ways. You can have all sorts of terms, all sorts of problems, and you will know exactly what the meaning is in each term because you know exactly what the operations are and what are the relations between them. Moreover, one has, as it were, the mastery of a field in which this group of operations is more or less the principle and the intelligibility. (Fs)

69a Now philosophy can be conceived as a basic group of operations; and as an insight into what that basic group of operations might be, you can take experiencing, understanding, and judging. The understanding can be differentiated, and you can get different kinds of combining of experiencing, understanding, and judging. (Fs) (notabene)