Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Second Collection

Titel: A Second Collection

Stichwort: Lonergan: Analyse der Frage (eg: Anklänge an Rahner); Gottesbeweis, Fr. Burrell

Kurzinhalt: It follows that to say that being is completely intelligible is not an idle empty phrase. It is true that we have no immediate knowledge of complete intelligibility ...

Textausschnitt: 40b Father Burrell has given a most helpful account of my position and he has followed it up with a forcefully presented objection to an argument for the existence of God. The argument began: If the real is completely intelligible, God exists. (Fs)
40c The objection is to the expression "completely intelligible." He grants that anything we know is known through its intelligibility, so that any reality we know must be intelligible. But he urges that we have no acquaintance with complete intelligibility; indeed, we cannot know it since knowing it would be enjoying an unrestricted infinite act of understanding. It follows that the minor premiss must be mistaken. If we cannot know complete intelligibility, then we cannot know that the real is completely intelligible. (Fs)

40d My answer would be that, besides knowing, there is intending. Whenever one asks a genuine question, one does not know the answer. Still, one does intend, desire, ask for the answer; one is able to tell when one gets an appropriate answer; and one is able to judge whether the appropriate answer is also correct. So between not knowing and knowing there is the process of coming to know. That process is intentional. It starts from experience but goes beyond it to understanding and judgment. Such going beyond is not blind. It is aware of itself as a going beyond the given, the incompletely known. This awareness consists in a conscious intending of an unknown that is to be known. (Fs)

1.Kommentar (26/01/08): Lonergans Analyse der Frag zeigt Anklänge an Rahners.

41a Now such intending has to be channelled and controlled. A fool can ask more questions than a wise man can answer. Even the wise man has to advert to the strategy that asks questions in a proper order, that selects the questions that can be answered now, that prefers the questions that once solved, lead to the solution of other questions. (Fs)

41b Behind this need for control and planning is the fact that the intending is of itself unrestricted. Our libraries are too small, yet more books keep being published. Our numerous and vast research projects only open the way for further research. To answer questions only gives rise to still further questions, and there is no prospect of this stream drying up from lack of further questions. (Fs)

41c Moreover, while questions can and must be criticized, they may not be arbitrarily brushed aside. Such arbitrary refusal is obscurantism, and to be an obscurantist is to cease to be an authentic human being. (Fs)

41d It follows that our intending intends, not incomplete, but complete intelligibility. If it intended no more than an incomplete intelligibility, there would be a point where further questions could arise but did not, where the half-answer appeared not a half-answer but as much an answer as human intelligence could dream of seeking. If the dynamism of human intellect intended no more than incomplete intelligibility, the horizon not merely of human knowledge but also of possible human inquiry would be bounded. Whether or not there were anything beyond that horizon, would be a question that could not even arise. (Fs) (notabene)

41e It follows that to say that being is completely intelligible is not an idle empty phrase. It is true that we have no immediate knowledge of complete intelligibility, for we have no immediate knowledge of God. It remains that our intelligence, at its living root, intends intelligibility but not incomplete intelligibility and so complete intelligibility. Further, since intending is just another name for meaning, it follows that complete intelligibility, so far from being meaningless to us, is in fact at the root of all our attempts to mean anything at all. (Fs)