Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: The Trinune God: Systematics

Titel: The Triune God: Systematics

Stichwort: univok - äquivok: das Erste für uns; Naturwissenschaften - Human- Geisteswissenschaften; Ausweg aus Relativismus (Objektseide): Tiefenpsychologie, Geschichte

Kurzinhalt: the difference between nature and spirit, between the natural sciences and the properly human sciences, is that, for all practical purposes, those realities that are prior for us ...

Textausschnitt: 77c If we want to see what this historical movement really was like, two considerations are necessary. First, we need to form those concepts that will help us grasp clearly and distinctly the intelligibility of historical reality both in general and in those matters that touch the Catholic faith more intimately. Second, after proposing those concepts in this seventh section, we will seek in the next section some understanding of this theological movement, a movement which is intimately connected with what has been called the development of dogma. (Fs)

77d Again, to begin from general notions, the difference between nature and spirit, between the natural sciences and the properly human sciences, is that, for all practical purposes, those realities that are prior for us, better known to us, more obvious to us seem in the natural sciences to remain stable, whereas in the human sciences they undergo slight but continual changes. Colors and sounds, the heavy and the light, the hot and the cold, the dry and the moist, the smooth and the rough, the hard and the soft, and everything else that becomes known to the senses seem to share a kind of immutability with the unchanged character of the human body. As a result, in the natural sciences the categories that express what is prior for us are univocal. But the law of the spirit is different from the law of nature. Languages and customs, domestic, economic, and political structures, the mechanical and liberal arts, religions and sciences not only are multiplied with great diversity, but they also go through recurrent patterns of increase, flourishing, and decay with an astounding fertility and restlessness. For individual human beings, what is prior, better known, and more obvious is whatever they were seeing, hearing, and doing when they were infants or children or adolescents or young adults. And so, as a result of the very variety and inconstancy of human affairs, the categories that indicate what is prior for us become equivocal in the extreme. The us in question is not something fixed and changeless. There are as many remarkable and deep differences in what are spontaneously counted as prior, better known, and more obvious in human affairs as there are periods, ages, cultures, nations, social classes - in fact, almost as many as there are individual human beings. (Fs) (notabene)

79a These differences, which we may for brevity's sake designate as 'cultural,' give rise at once to a fundamental problem: the problem of finding a transcultural principle that would enable us to pass systematically from what is prior for one person to what is prior for another. (Fs)

79b A first element in the solution is appropriated from depth psychology. Human beings are alike not just in their senses but also in those spontaneous symbols in which sensibility both manifests its own finality to spirit and conversely discloses to itself [...]

79c A second element in the solution is the slower and more difficult process by which scholars manage gradually to acquire the culture and almost the mentality of another place and time. [...]

79d A third element in the solution is that not only can narratives of past events be read, compared, and woven together into a single coherent account, but also everything we know from other sciences can be used to help us reach as full an understanding as possible of the whole life of another age in all its aspects: mechanical, artistic, economic, political, social, scientific, philosophical, religious. (Fs)

81a Still, these three elements, even when taken together, hardly provide a full solution to the problem. They help individual researchers cross over from their own culture to a foreign culture. They allow individual scholars somehow to make their own whatever belongs to the foreign culture. They even make it possible that many investigators, provided they belong to the same culture, age, and school of thought, might agree on the objective sequence and significance of historical events. But that hardly overcomes the very serious and most inconvenient fact that there are as many accounts of what was done and as many interpretations of what was said and written as there are cultures, schools, and tendencies of thought. The transcultural problem may indeed be solved, so to speak, on the side of the object, but on the side of the subject it remains unsolved. And that is why we are often told that there are two types of questions: those that deal with material reality can be settled scientifically, while those that touch rather on human principles, judgments, and decisions are left exposed to an inevitable relativism. (Fs) (notabene)

81b This division of questions can be accounted for partly from what we have said already, and partly from certain philosophical or methodological principles. Certitude is allowed regarding what is more material, because what is prior for us, better known to us, more obvious to us in the realm of nature is for all practical purposes univocal. But skepticism prevails in regard to whatever is cultural and spiritual, because in the properly human realm there is considerable equivocity regarding what is prior for some and prior for others, better known to some and better known to others, more obvious to some and more obvious to others.1 Still, suppose one asks, 'Why do historical scholars settle for the merely relative? Why do they put so much study and so much labor into passing simply from what is relative-to-others to what is relative-to-themselves? Why do they not put their effort into uncovering what is prior, more knowable, more obvious in itself?' The frequent response is either that it is safer to avoid all the opinions of philosophers or that some relativistic philosophy is true. (Fs)

81c This kind of 'historicism,' whether in itself or in its philosophical presuppositions or in the theological consequences of these presuppositions, was condemned again and again by Pius XII in his encyclical Humani generis?2 In another work I have discussed the way to attack the real root of relativism and sketched the method by which one can proceed scientifically to the true interpretation of documents.3 (Fs)