Autor: Mehrere Autoren: Lonergan Workshop, Volume 4

Buch: Lonergan Workshop, Volume 4, Supplmentary Issue

Titel: Mehrere Autoren: Lonergan Workshop

Stichwort: Der "wesentliche" Lonergan; Geschichte

Kurzinhalt: The 'Essential' Lonergan; I would claim that the need to understand history, basic history, the history that happens, is the chief dynamic element in all his academic work.

Textausschnitt: 2.1 The 'Essential' Lonergan

4c What is the role of history in Lonergan's thinking? I would claim that the need to understand history, basic history, the history that happens, is the chief dynamic element in all his academic work. From start to finish history is the pervasive theme: not insight, not method, not economics, not emergent probability, but history. I suggested something like that in this workshop a few years ago. The idea didn't exactly catch fire. Nevertheless I present it again, I will even call it the 'essential' Lonergan, and I will try to make a better case for it this time. (Fs)

4d Any number of books use the word 'essential' in their title: The Essential Augustine, The Essential Confucius, The Essential Darwin; I suspect that most of them offer a selection of writings, and the selection is meant to convey the main ideas of a particular thinker. That is a legitimate use of 'essential' but it is not the usage here. I am not referring to a selection of writings; I am referring rather to the key to such a selection, and the key to someone's mind and life and works. (Fs)

4e Notice that my 'essential Lonergan' is not the 'instant Lonergan' I began with; that was a mini 'table of contents'; it gave us two pegs to hang ideas on. It was a summarizing word, the term of a process of reduction. But my 'essential' describes a principle rather than a term; it is not a later summary of works, but the prior inspiration that would make the summary; it can be a tacit influence even when it is not declared. (Fs)

5a Think of it in terms of intentionality. What is the total intended goal of the total intending thought of Bernard Lonergan? What lies behind all his particular intendings, and all his achieved results? Behind all his labor to construct an organon, and all his efforts to apply it? He has taught us to recognize the intention of being latent in every concept.1 I would claim that there is a similar intention of universal history latent in all his writings, even in the great Insight and Method, which function then, not as the goal, but as an organon to move him toward the goal. This, I submit, is the essential and characteristic Lonergan. (Fs)

5b Can such a claim be proven? In a sense it doesn't need proof, for it just puts in other terms what we would all say, that Lonergan was concerned all his life with the real world: method, he would say, is not an end but a means; withdrawal is only for a return. But the real world is the world of people and what they do; and the sum total of what they do is their history. Of course, we study physics and chemistry and biology and the natural sciences generally, but mainly because and insofar as they are part of our human world. (Fs)

5c My position then hardly needs argument. Nevertheless I will argue. Think of prospectors in search of precious minerals: they watch for outcroppings of a hidden lode. Our outcroppings are certain little phrases that keep popping up: 'the transition from feudal to bourgeois society',2 'systems on the move';3 'ongoing discovery of mind';4 'the emergence of ethical value';5 the 'long transition from primitive fruit-gatherers, hunters, and fishers to the large-scale agriculture of the temple states';6 'from the compactness of the symbol to the differentiation of philosophic, scientific, theological, and historical consciousness';7 'how is there generated the transition from one level or stage in human culture to another later level or stage';8 and so on, and so on. (Fs)

6a 'On the move,' 'ongoing,' transition,' emergence,' 'from ... to' - they are all outcroppings of a lode, signs of a mindset, pointers to the essential Lonergan. Aristotle and Aquinas say that character is manifested in sudden reactions to the unexpected, 'ex repentinis.'9 These phrases have the same effect. They show us one whose second nature is to think in terms of change, development, history. They suggest the need to add to 'Insight Revisited' a more comprehensive 'History, or Lonergan Revisited.' (Fs)

6b Let's revisit him at least at the start and finish of his career. There is that letter of 1938 when he said to his religious superior, 'philosophy of history is as yet not recognized as the essential branch of philosophy that it is,' and asked for freedom to work on that needed branch.10 Likewise in 1982 at the end of his career, in the last paper he gave, he was still deep into history: 'It is cultural change that has made Scholasticism no longer relevant and demands the development of a new theological method and style, continuous indeed with the old, yet meeting all the genuine exigences both of Christian religion and of up-to-date philosophy, science, and scholarship.'11 How many works can you find between 1938 and 1982 that do not include some reference to the transitions of history? I do not mean that you can find the word in every paragraph or even every chapter but, as an ascetic finds God in a multiplication table, so in Lonergan, at a deeper level in his spirit, the intention of history is always operative. (Fs)

7a These pointers are only my build-up; his own statements clinch the matter. In his 1958 lectures on education he stated that 'reflection on history is one of the richest, profoundest, and most significant things there is. In the past few centuries any great movement has been historical in its inspiration and its formulation.'12 Almost twenty years later he stated that 'to understand men and their institutions we have to study their history. For it is in history that man's making of man occurs, that it progresses and regresses, that through such changes there may be discerned a certain unity in an otherwise disconcerting multiplicity.'13 He links the two great works of his organon to a theory of history: 'I have a general theory of history implicit in Insight and in Method.'14 And sees it as explaining doctrinal development: 'the intelligibility proper to developing doctrines is the intelligibility immanent in historical process.'15 And he expressly relates his 1938 position to that of twenty-five years later.16

7b So much for the question that: is it a fact that history has a pervasive role in his mindset? Let us return to the question what. What are Lonergan's views on that history of the past which I hope to extend in part 3 into the 'history' of the future? I have three headings for this: the underlying structure of history, the possibility of history, the actual transitions of history. (Fs)