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

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

Titel: Byrne, Patrick H., Insight and the Retrieval of Nature

Stichwort: Dialektik: Verlust der Natur; Rationalisierungen einer Nicht-Natur (Wille zur Macht, etc.)

Kurzinhalt: The "loss of nature" is not a past event, but rather an ongoing historical process with a clear dialectical structure. That structure can be summarized as follows:

Textausschnitt: 24a The "loss of nature" is not a past event, but rather an ongoing historical process with a clear dialectical structure. That structure can be summarized as follows:

(a) there arises a misunderstanding of nature;
(b) the misunderstanding becomes incorporated and passed on as part of the tradition's meaning of 'nature';
(c) the inherited meaning of 'nature' comes to be ill-received, partly because of the originally distorted understanding, partly because of the biases and resentments of its heirs;
(d) the unfavorable reception becomes the basis of a counter-movement against some of the older misunderstandings as well as some of the older normative understandings. Thereby a new and more complexly distorted meaning of 'nature' is introduced;
(e) the cycle repeats itself. (Fs) (notabene)

24b Eventually there arises a stage in the series of cycles when the distortion gets so severe that the very idea of there being anything 'natural' is explicitly rejected. This does not mean, however, that there is no longer any operative meaning of 'nature.' Rather, ever more distorted meanings of what is natural are generated, but hidden under the guises of a variety of terms (for example, "history," "the will to power," and so on). At this point detection and reversal of the misunderstandings becomes an exceptionally difficult task. (Fs) (notabene)

25a The foregoing outlines the dialectical structure of the loss of the notion of nature. As an ongoing historical process, the loss of the normative notion of nature displays all the complexities of concrete human living. As ongoing, the process is currently operating in our culture, and yet it is not new. Plato and Aristotle both noted that the variety of opinions about what is natural had led many of their contemporaries to express the opinion that nothing was right by nature. Thomas Aquinas's Contra Gentiles was structured to counter a series of misunderstandings regarding the compatibility of Christian faith with a science of nature. Modernity employed different ideas of modern science against traditional natural standards. The details of this ongoing historical process are too intricate for treatment within the confines of the present paper. (Fs)