Autor: Vertin, Michael -- Mehrere Autoren: Lonergan Workshop, Volume 8

Buch: Lonergan's "Three Basic Questions" and a Philosophy of Philosophies

Titel: Michael Vertin, Lonergan's "Three Basic Questions" and a Philosophy of Philosophies

Stichwort: Philosophische Grundpositionen nach Lonergan: Empirismus, naiver Realismus, Idealismus, kritischer Realismus

Kurzinhalt: ... for the empiricist, the activity called "knowing" is nothing other than sensing, sensory intuiting, physical seeing; ...

Textausschnitt: 3.2 On the basic philosophical stances

217a In line with our terminology, a basic philosophical stance for Lonergan is the answer that one gives to the initial question about knowing, or the question about epistemic objectivity, or the question about reality; and an integral set of basic philosophical stances is the ordered group of one's answers to all three questions. Dialectically opposed integral sets are those whose corresponding stances on knowing and/or epistemic objectivity and/or reality are radically and totally opposed. Are there any examples? (Fs)

217b During the long course of his investigations Lonergan time and again discusses various dialectically opposed integral sets of basic philosophical stances; but he regularly lays special emphasis on four, which he labels "empiricism," "naive realism," "idealism," and "critical realism" (1967b: 207-220, 231-236; 1971: 14-15; 1972b: 76, 238-39, 263-65; 1974: 30,219,239-14; cf. 1967a: 7, 20, 179n 200; 1957: xxviii, 361, 489,496, 634-35). While the four differ in a variety of ways, the most important difference is between the first three, on the one hand, and the fourth, on the other. The first three share the conviction that the essential feature of epistemically objective cognitional acts is that they achieve their contents directly, immediately, intuitively, in a way that is either simply identical with or at least similar to the way that acts of sensing achieve their contents. In Lonergan's shorthand characterization of this claim, objective cognitional acts are acts of "seeing." The fourth, by contrast, rejects this claim. (Fs)

218a More amply, then, for the empiricist, the activity called "knowing" is nothing other than sensing, sensory intuiting, physical seeing; this activity is epistemically objective because it satisfies the principle that objective knowing is sensing, sensory intuiting, ocular vision; and reality is precisely what is capable of being sensed, intuited via the senses, seen with the eye of the body. (Fs)

218b For the naive realist, the activity called "knowing" is mainly or even exclusively a supposed supra-sensory perceiving, intellectual intuiting, spiritual seeing; this activity is epistemically objective because it meets the principle that objective knowing is mainly or even exclusively supra-sensory perceiving, intellectual intuiting, mental vision; and reality is mainly or even exclusively what is able to be perceived in supra-sensory fashion, intellectually intuited, seen with the eye of the mind. (Fs)

218c For the idealist, the activity called "knowing" includes an intellectual unifying, organizing, synthesizing of sense data; but it does not include the naive realist's intellectual perceiving, intuiting, seeing, for the idealist cannot discover the presence of any such activity. Still, the idealist maintains the naive realist's principle that objective knowing is supra-sensory perceiving, intellectual intuiting, mental vision. Consequently, knowing is not epistemically objective, and no cognitively justifiable characterization of reality can be given. (Fs)

218d For the critical realist, the activity called "knowing" includes three components: experiencing, which is either sensing or-in the case of self-knowing-primitive self-presence, consciousness; understanding, which is the intellectual unifying of the data of sense or of consciousness; and judging, which is the rationally justified affirming of the intellectually unified data of sense or of consciousness. This composite activity is deemed epistemically objective not by virtue of some abstract principle of epistemic objectivity but rather because-so claims the critical realist-every attempt to dispute its objectivity inevitably presupposes that very objectivity on the level of actual performance. And the reality proportionate to human knowing is a compound of the experienceable, the intelligible, and the affirmable. (Fs) (notabene)

219a On Lonergan's own view, of course, the fourth of these dialectically opposed integral sets of basic philosophical stances- critical realism-is uniquely correct, fully critical, fundamentally "positional." Its stance on reality is implied by its stances on epistemic objectivity and the activity named "knowing"; its stance on epistemic objectivity is implied by its stance on the activity named "knowing"; and its stance on the activity named "knowing" results from a thorough reflexive objectification of cognitional operations that concretely one already experiences oneself performing. All the other sets of stances, by contrast, are somehow deficient, uncritical in one way or another, fundamentally "counterpositional." Specifically, empiricism, naive realism, and idealism all suffer from their commitment to the mistaken principle that epistemically objective cognitional activity is essentially some type of seeing, a principle which arises in the absence of sufficient concrete knowledge of one's own cognitional activity, and a principle which itself is nothing other than an unwarranted generalization of a cognitional feature that one may well indeed be concretely familiar with. It must not be thought, however, that eliminating the "myth" that knowing is seeing, and thus shifting into the basic stances of critical realism, is an easy matter. In fact, so pervasive and deep-rooted is this myth that the achievement of eliminating it from one's own habits of mind is a