Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Second Collection

Titel: A Second Collection

Stichwort: Natur - Geschichtlichkeit, Intentionalität; abstrakt - konkret; Ausschluss des Konkreten: nicht theologisch

Kurzinhalt: If one abstracts from all respects in which one man can differ from another, there is left a residue named human nature ... One can begin from people as they are

Textausschnitt: 3b If one abstracts from all respects in which one man can differ from another, there is left a residue named human nature and the truism that human nature is always the same. One may fit out the eternal identity, human nature, with a natural law. One may complete it with the principles for the erection of positive law. One may hearken to divine revelation to acknowledge a super­natural order, a divine law, and a positive ecclesiastical law. So one may work methodically from the abstract and universal towards the more concrete and particular, and the more one does so, the more one is involved in the casuistry of applying a variety of universals to concrete singularity. (Fs)

3c It seems most unlikely that in this fashion one will arrive at a law demanding the change of laws, forms, structures, methods. For universals do not change; they are just what they are defined to be; and to introduce a new definition is, not to change the old universal, but to place another new universal beside the old one. On the other hand, casuistry deals with the casus, with the way things chance to fall. But every good Aristotelian knows that there is no science of the accidental (Aristotle, Metaphysics VI [E], 2, 1027a 19f.), and so from casuistry’s cases one can hardly conclude to some law about changing laws. (Fs) (notabene)

3c Still, the foregoing is not the only possible approach. One can begin from people as they are. One can note that, apart from times of dreamless sleep, they are performing intentional acts. They are experiencing, imagining, desiring, fearing; they wonder, come to understand, conceive; they reflect, weigh the evidence, judge; they deliberate, decide, act. If dreamless sleep may be compared to death, human living is being awake; it is a matter of performing intentional acts; in short, such acts informed by meaning are precisely what gives significance to human living and, conversely, to deny all meaning to human life is nihilism. (Fs)

[...]
5a I have been contrasting two different apprehensions of man. One can apprehend man abstractly through a definition that applies omni et soli and through properties verifiable in every man. In this fashion one knows man as such; and man as such, precisely because he is an abstraction, also is unchanging. It follows in the first place, that on this view one is never going to arrive at any exigence for changing forms, structures, methods, for all change occurs in the concrete, and on this view the concrete is always omitted. But it also follows in the second place, that this exclusion of changing forms, structures, methods, is not theological; it is grounded simply upon a certain conception of scientific or philosophic method; that conception is no longer the only conception or the commonly received conception; and I think our Scripture scholars would agree that its abstractness, and the omissions due to abstraction, have no foundation in the revealed word of God. (Fs) (notabene)

5b On the other hand, one can apprehend mankind as a concrete aggregate developing over time, where the locus of development and, so to speak, the synthetic bond is the emergence, expansion, differentiation, dialectic of meaning and of meaningful per­formance. On this view intentionality, meaning, is a constitutive component of human living; moreover, this component is not fixed, static, immutable, but shifting, developing, going astray, capable of redemption; on this view there is in the historicity, which results from human nature, an exigence for changing forms, structures, methods; and it is on this level and through this medium of changing meaning that divine revelation has entered the world and that the Church’s witness is given to it. (Fs) (notabene)