Autor: Mehrere Autoren: Lonergan Workshop, Volume 4

Buch: Lonergan Workshop, Volume 4, Supplmentary Issue

Titel: On the "Meditative Origin of the Philosophical Knowledge of Order"

Stichwort: Lawrence über Voegelin: Intentionalität (keine Beschränkung auf Sinneserfahrung); Intentionalität - Staunen, Selbsttranszendenz; Objekt, Ding, Realität

Kurzinhalt: ... I would question the adequacy in his analysis of the intentionality structure of using sense perception to provide the main specification of the meaning of intentionality. Why not use wonder or questioning as the key to the meaning of intentionality?

Textausschnitt: 59a
A. Intentionality: For me, the most questionable part of Voegelin's analysis is his treatment of intentionality along with the cognate terms, "object" and "thing." The main problem I have is with the dominance of the model of sense perception in it. I would contend that there are conscious acts which are intentional, but which simply may not be helpfully compared to sensory acts. Thus, just as Voegelin criticized the narrowness of Husserl's choice of examples of auditory perception in relation to the matter of consciousness as a stream and the constitution of time-consciousness, so I would question the adequacy in his analysis of the intentionality structure of using sense perception to provide the main specification of the meaning of intentionality. Why not use wonder or questioning as the key to the meaning of intentionality? This would be more in harmony with the centrality of the participatory experience of the tension towards the ground of being as well as with the dynamics of remembering. Surely it can be shown that the range of conscious and intentional activities at work in concrete human questing involves irreducibly distinct yet complementary kinds of questions and coordinate acts which arise in response to these questions. These acts are also intentional, but what they intend most radically is not "the already-out-there-now," but being. Acknowledging the fuller range of wonder's dynamic structure bursts open the meaning of intentionality as restricted to the experience of discrete acts of sense perception of the already-out-there-now. For if intentionality springs from primordial wonder, the potential range of consciousness as intentional matches that of the questioning response to the mysterious pull of transcendent mystery. (Fs) (notabene)

59b
1. Correlative revision in notion of consciousness: Shifting from sense perception to wonder as the key to human consciousness even as intentional allows us to understand consciousness itself in a manner that only confirms Voegelin's basic insight into consciousness as "the In-Between reality of the participatory pure experience" (1977a: 171). To begin with, it let us expand Voegelin's brief against "the immanentizing language of a human consciousness which, as a subject, is opposed to an object of experience" to the specific reality of human knowing. When Voegelin's analysis of conscious intentionality is radicalized by asking about what we as concrete persons actually do when we ask and answer questions, we find that human knowing is not a simple, mysterious confrontational relationship between subject and object on the analogy of sensing, but a structured activity composed of distinct elements none of which alone constitutes knowledge by itself, since each element is merely a constitutive part of the whole we name knowledge. At the same time we discover that consciousness as a strictly inner experience of oneself and one's cognitive and appetitive acts is nothing like an inward look, but a property common to those acts, in spite of the differences in their contents, which is evidently not shared by other bodily acts like the growth of our hair and fingernails. We grasp, too, that it is on the basis of this similarity that the acts of sensing, inquiring, understanding, critical reflection, and judgment are not disconnected, but get integrated into unified acts of knowing. Wonder, inquiry, direct insight, etc., form a natural unity because they are conscious. And so consciousness, which is activated by and in accord with these manifold and diverse processes, achieves their immanent identify, even as it itself goes beyond each of them by providing them their constant point of reference. The inner experience of consciousness secures our presence to what we intend by conscious acts; but through these acts of apprehension and appetite, it is also operative as a concomitant and irreducible presence to self. (Fs)

2. Conscious Intentionality and Self-transcendence: The present analysis of conscious intentionality agrees with Plato, Aristotle, and Voegelin that the central manifestation of consciousness as human is the specific tension of spirit we call wonder. This disturbance, this unrest within us that renders Hume's world of sensations puzzling and questionable is rooted in human consciousness as that by which we are originally given to and experience ourselves, prior to any intelligent and reasonable response, and prior even to any determination and formulation of wonder by an inner word. For doesn't wonder mean that we are given to ourselves as an infinite potentiality that strives toward the whole of being in a dynamic movement? And isn't consciousness basically just this presence of ourselves to ourselves in unrestricted and active potentiality, the self-presence, that is to say, of a principle of infinite questioning and questing whose measure and standard is determined by the goal of infinite understanding and love that is the divine mystery? If these questions can be answered affirmatively, then consciousness is an unrestricted dynamism that underpins and penetrates all our knowing. "It is an unrestricted intention that intends the transcendent, and a process of self-transcendence that reaches it" (Lonergan, 1967a:231). This is what makes possible that "ceaseless action of expanding, ordering, articulating, and correcting itself" that Voegelin tells us activates "conscious existence" as an "event in the reality of which as a part it partakes" (1977a: 221). (Fs) (notabene)

3. The Meaning of "OBJECT", "THING", "REALITY": If we turn, then, to a basic meaning of the words, "object," and "thing", it becomes clear that they should not be made equivalent to the correlative of sense perception. Indeed, to think of "thing-ness" as spatio-temporal bodiliness and of objectivity as "the already-out-there-now" is to fall into a conception of reality and of being that is irrational. This is not to dispute the spontaneous evidence of an external world or the rationality of propositions based upon such evidence, but to suggest that problems of immanentism and relativism are only resolved within the unrestricted horizon of the question. With that horizon, then, reality is the object of those acts by which the unrestricted desire to know is actuated and by which the quest for knowledge becomes actual knowledge. A more exacting examination of our mental processes of coming to know shows how sense perceptions provoke a structure of several intellectual operations that are "related to sensitive operations, not by similarity, but by functional complementarity" (Lonergan 1967a:234): inquiry, understanding, conceiving, critical reflection, reflective insight, and judgment. Once we acknowledge this structure of consciousness as under the sway of wonder, it becomes difficult to limit the meaning of "object", "things", and "reality" to the "already-out-there-now" grasped by sense perception. Instead they are what we apprehend by insight and reasonable affirmation. (Fs)

61a This conception of "object", "thing", "reality" as the objective of the dynamic structure of our pure desire to know does not entail any bondage to a principle of immanence:
Because the intention [of consciousness] is unrestricted, it is not restricted to the immanent content of knowing, to Bewusstseinsinhalte; at least, we can ask whether there is anything beyond that, and the mere fact that the question can be asked reveals that the intention, which the question manifests, is not limited by any principle of immanence. But answers are to questions, so that if questions are transcendent, so also must the meaning of corresponding answers (Lonergan, 1967a:230). (Fs)