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: Lonergan: Natur; Schlüsselwort: "explanatory" Natur als klassische heuristische Struktur; Beispiele: Galileo, Robert Boyle

Kurzinhalt: Still, the basic meaning of "explanatory" is the fundamental key to our understanding how Lonergan retrieves the normative core of Aristotle's philosophy of nature while escaping its limitations which motivated the dialectical loss ...

Textausschnitt: 2.2 Immanent Nature and Explanation

26b In Section 1.3 of Part 1, I introduced the phrase, "immanent nature," to denote Aristotle's "nature as a principle of motion and rest in that to which it belongs primarily." I used "immanent" both in order to distinguish it from "Nature as a whole," and to avoid the counterposition suggested by the preposition, "in." How is that account of nature connected with Insight? How does much of what was covered correspond to what Lonergan himself called "nature"? In fact, his own use of the term is restricted to one small portion of the book devoted to one of the "heuristic notions" of modern science. Is it an extravagant claim to say that Insight can be understood as a retrieval of Aristotle's notion of nature? (Fs) (notabene)

27a I would like to suggest that the underlying puzzlement here has to do with the extraordinary cultural transformation condensed by Lonergan into the term, "explanatory." It is impossible to overestimate the range of cultural challenges which have flowed from the emergence of modern explanatory practices when, first, the question of explanation began to be put with a new urgency; second, there arose over the relatively short span of about one hundred years whole ranges of mathematical and scientific innovations which vastly clarified just what sort of answers the explanatory questions were seeking; and third, the modern "natural" sciences discovered tremendously flexible and incisive analytic aids to finding answers to certain of these questions for explanation. (Fs)

27b However brief, Lonergan's discussion of the heuristic notion of "nature" did clarify in the most fundamental fashion just what explanation really is. Moreover, whereas Aristotle and his successors simply used "nature" in an undifferentiated sense, Lonergan also introduced other terms such as "state," "emergent probability," "genetic operator and integrator," "immanent intelligibility," and "invariant structure of consciousness." These differentiated terms avoid the misunderstandings associated with the compact use of "nature" in the classicist tradition. Still, the basic meaning of "explanatory" is the fundamental key to our understanding how Lonergan retrieves the normative core of Aristotle's philosophy of nature while escaping its limitations which motivated the dialectical loss of any notion of nature. Strictly speaking, not Lonergan's use of the term, "nature," but his "explanatory genera and species" corresponds most closely to Aristotle's term, "immanent nature." Yet, in what follows I hope to show there is a connection of explanatory genera and species with Lonergan's usage of the term, "nature." (Fs) (notabene)

27c To begin with, Lonergan's term, "nature," denotes a kind of question, not a principle or cause in the more traditional sense. (Fs)

For what is to be known by understanding these data is called their nature ... What is to be known insofar as data are understood is some correlation or function that states universally the relations of things not to our senses but to one another (1958: 36; 44). (Fs)

28a Hence, Lonergan first links the meaning of "nature" with a certain kind of question about specific sense data. It is a to-be-understood, but not yet understood. The heuristic notion of "nature" guides and orients what Lonergan calls the "classical heuristic structure." The "notion" of nature interrogatively intends what is to be understood by an explanatory classical correlation, an explanatory functional relation. This will sound strange indeed to an Aristotelian, a Lockean, or a romantic. But this strangeness is simply an index of the profound cultural change grounded by the shift into explanatory and heuristic thinking. (Fs)
28b What does it mean to speak of "nature" in this sense of a "notion," when one does not yet understand what the notion intends? How can one discourse about what one does not yet understand? The answer has to do with the fact that a term can be specified in two ways: either directly, or via its relation to something else. In the case of a heuristic notion such as "nature," the term is specified in the second way. The "nature" to be understood has a relation to the data; the data are known through sensation and description; the relation is known through the intention, the anticipation, of explanatory inquiry. So one may meaningfully speak of the "nature" of fire, light, reproduction, humanity, or whatever via this indirect route (1958: 37). (Fs)

28c The indirect way of discoursing about natures has a severe limitation, however, for the data are only described in relation to our senses. But our sense experiencings are selected and patterned in accord with our orientation, our de facto self-constitutions. We can speak of the nature of fire as "to go up," "to be hot, bright, destructive," and so on. Yet all these terms are descriptive; they have their meanings in relationship to our sense experiencings as they function in our ordinary routines of living. Furthermore, for Lonergan we would only be able to speak of anything's nature in the full sense if the orientation of our self-constitution were as unrestricted as the whole universe (Lonergan, 1959: 76-79). So in restricting ourselves to thinking about natures only descriptively or even heuristically, there is real danger that without realizing it, our idea of what is and is not natural is incorporated within the restricted horizon of our own practical interests. (Fs)

29a Furthermore, amidst the pull of already constituted concerns it is quite easy to neglect the second component of the meaning of nature, namely the relation to the explanatory question. If one neglects the fact that "nature" is only what will be attained in a fully explanatory account, the data as described by themselves can seem to give answers. "What is the nature of fire?" then becomes not what one will understand when one understands in an explanatory fashion why it goes up (and under what circumstances it will not); rather the nature of fire is to go up, period. Thus, Lonergan's meaning of "nature" runs counter to the classicist or modern or romantic focus upon things as related to one's senses and one's unexamined and unchallenged practical orientation. (Fs)

29b Lonergan's meaning of "nature," then, is what is to be understood about data in an explanatory fashion. This means that the data are to be understood as related according to specific functional correlations. For example, Galileo held that "natural free-fall" was uniform acceleration and, furthermore, that uniform acceleration consisted in a very definite relation of proportionality between some of its "material" parts: the distances traversed and the squares of the times of transit. Symbolically, that relationship is:

[...] (Formeln können im Textmodus leider nicht dargestellt werde)

34a Even so, Newton himself did not altogether escape the realm of the descriptive. His second law of motion and gravitation presupposed the existence of absolute space.1 To speak of "absolute space" is just a descriptive way to speak of "Euclidean geometry." Absolute space has its meaning in the descriptive relationship to a de facto limited patterning of someone's imagination (and Newton has had plenty of company in this limitation). But to speak instead of "Euclidean geometry" is to grasp the relationship of this particular patterning to other equally intelligible "non-Euclidean" patternings. Riemann and others built upon Gauss's work to develop a "tensor (or 'absolute') calculus" as the basis for the explanatory seriation of geometries to one another. (Fs)