Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Second Collection

Titel: A Second Collection

Stichwort: Subjekt - objektive Wahrheit; veritas formaliter est in solo iudicio

Kurzinhalt: truth exists formally only in judgments ... What God reveals is a truth in the mind of God and in the minds of believers, but it is not a truth in the minds of nonbelievers

Textausschnitt: 69c In contemporary philosophy there is a great emphasis on the subject, and this emphasis may easily be traced to the influence of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Buber.1 This fact, however, points to a previous period of neglect, and it may not be amiss to advert to the causes of such neglect, if only to make sure that they are no longer operative in our own thinking. (Fs)

70a A first cause, then, is the objectivity of truth. The criterion, I believe, by which we arrive at the truth is a virtually unconditioned.2 But an unconditioned has no conditions. A subject may be needed to arrive at truth, but, once truth is attained, one is beyond the subject and one has reached a realm that is non-spatial, atemporal, impersonal. Whatever is true at any time or place, can be contradicted only by falsity. No one can gainsay it, unless he is mistaken and errs. (Fs)

70b Such is the objectivity of truth. But do not be fascinated by it. Intentionally it is independent of the subject, but ontologically it resides only in the subject: veritas formaliter est in solo iudicio. Intentionally it goes completely beyond the subject, yet it does so only because ontologically the subject is capable of an intentional self-transcendence, of going beyond what he feels, what he imagines, what he thinks, what seems to him, to something utterly different, to what is so. Moreover, before the subject can attain the self-transcendence of truth, there is the slow and laborious process of conception, gestation, parturition. But teaching and learning, investigating, coming to understand, marshalling and weighing the evidence, these are not independent of the subject, of times and places, of psychological, social, historical conditions. The fruit of truth must grow and mature on the tree of the subject, before it can be plucked and placed in its absolute realm. (Fs)

71a It remains that one can be fascinated by the objectivity of truth, that one can so emphasize objective truth as to disregard or undermine the very conditions of its emergence and existence. In fact, if at the present time among Catholics there is discerned a widespread alienation from the dogmas of faith, this is not unconnected with a previous one-sidedness that so insisted on the objectivity of truth as to leave subjects and their needs out of account. (Fs)

71b Symptomatic of such one-sidedness was the difficulty experienced by theologians from the days of Suarez, de Lugo, and Bañez, when confronted with the syllogism: What God has revealed is true. God has revealed the mysteries of faith. Therefore, the mysteries of faith are true.3 There is, perhaps, no need for me to explain - why this syllogism was embarrassing, for it implied that the mysteries of faith were demonstrable conclusions. But the point I wish to make is that the syllogism contains an unnoticed fallacy, and the fallacy turns on an exaggerated view of the objectivity of truth. If one recalls that truth exists formally only in judgments and that judgments exist only in the mind, then the fallacy is easily pinned down. What God reveals is a truth in the mind of God and in the minds of believers, but it is not a truth in the minds of nonbelievers; and to conclude that the mysteries of faith, are truths in the mind of God or in the minds of believers in no way suggests that the mysteries are demonstrable. But this simple way out seems to have been missed by the theologians. They seem to have thought of truth as so objective as to get along without minds. Nor does such thinking seem to have been confined to theoretical accounts of the act of faith. The same insistence on objective truth and the same neglect of its subjective conditions informed the old catechetics, which the new catechetics is replacing, and the old censorship, which insisted on true propositions and little understood the need to respect the dynamics of the advance toward truth. (Fs)