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: menschliche Natur und Geschichtlichkeit 2; recurrant schemes: Geschichte, Meinungen; Tugend - moralische Impotenz

Kurzinhalt: Human schemes of living are natural if they are intelligent, reasonable, responsible, and loving-an exceptionally high standard.

Textausschnitt: 52b Fourth, both schemes of consciousness and their developments are conditioned. Direct insights play a central role in informing human living, for decisions and the judgments of value which motivate them presuppose something to decide about and to be judged as having or lacking value. That "something" is what insight grasps. But insights themselves presuppose experiences-sensible, remembered, or constructed by intelligently alert imagining. Hence, human experiencing conditions (but does not completely determine) human living in three ways: through its own patterning or orienting of conscious flows; through the schemes of neural demands; and through the schemes of meaning which constitute the shared life of human history. (Fs)

(i) Human schemes of living are natural if they are intelligent, reasonable, responsible, and loving-an exceptionally high standard. Therefore, experiencing functions in a natural, human way when it collaborates with, is systematized by, and is developed by intelligence, reasonableness, responsibility, and loving. But human beings can freely violate their own nature. One way in which this happens is when the orientation of human experiencing is anything except the experiences which would occasion the insight sought by natural human questioning (1958: 192). Hence, human beings can develop vices, bad habits, aberrant orientations. These condition consciousness by obstructing understanding, correct judgments of fact and value, and decisions. Such orientations "prevent the emergence into consciousness of perspectives that would give rise to unwanted insights ... [and admit] to consciousness ... any materials in any other arrangement or perspective [so long as they do not give rise to unwanted insights] (1958: 192). Such obstructions can serve other desires, fears, and interests-the fear of death, desires for acquisitions, and so on. But insofar as such an orientation violates the cause of intelligence, reasonableness, and goodness, it is ultimately without proportionate reason and therefore humanly unnatural. (Fs) (notabene)
53a On the other hand, patternings of experiencing can condition recurrent human functioning and development in natural ways. Such patternings readily and flexibly supply intelligence with images to figure out the what, how, and why of things and occurrences. They conjure up counter-examples for judgments of fact. They flesh out fundamental options for human living in concretely imaginative ways, and complement possible courses of action with naturally appropriate feelings of admiration or revulsion. Such orientations condition human living in ways which are natural to its functioning. (Fs)

(ii) Second, while human sensing has a wide range of selectivity to its attention, while memory and imagination admit of even greater flexibility, nevertheless all are based in neural physiology. Neural physiology is characterized by recurrent patterns of electrochemical impulses, which sensing, remembering, and imagining systematize into experiential patterns or schemes of recurrence. Hence, concrete human living consists in ever meeting the challenge of intelligently, reasonably, responsibly, and lovingly responding to the "neural demand functions," the lower cycles which condition such higher schemes. (Fs)

53b Now it is to be noted that different human beings have different neural demand schemes, and that such schemes occur with greater or lesser frequency and completeness. Most obvious examples come from contrasts between normal and pathological neural demand functions. Hyperactivity, dyslexia, schizophrenia, manic-depressive disease, and proneness to alcoholism are all believed to be based in schemes of neural functioning which occur with frequencies above or below the average. Less well understood and less easily defined examples concern the different sorts of neural rhythms of men and women, and of infants, adolescents, and adults. It follows that people with differing frequencies of neural schemes of recurrence will have somewhat different experiencings, and that the higher levels of consciousness will endeavor to respond to these in correspondingly different, but nevertheless intelligent and responsible fashions. In fact, any attempt to impress identical habits upon all such differences would be anything but intelligent and responsible. (Fs)

54a These observations make the transposition of natural virtues more concrete. In Aristotle's account, the moral virtues are patternings of desires and fears which support right action. But Aristotle was emphatic that there was a degree of indeterminacy in such virtues, for "matters concerned with conduct and what is good for us do not have fixity" (1104a3-5).1 Hence, the virtue of self-restraint may characterize both an average and a hyperactive person, but the concrete conscious schemes which constitute this virtue will not be identical. (Fs)

54b Finally, although it may be rather abstract to formulate the matter this way, such things as unnatural frequencies of neural schemes of recurrence would tend toward a limit of zero if one were to prescind from the problem of moral impotence.2 Otherwise, neural schemes which pose problems for human living for which there are no possible intelligent, reasonable, responsible, or loving solutions would be natural. By nature human intelligence is as open as the unrestricted desire so that such solutions can be found in principle unless the objective surd of sin in fact were to condition that natural openness unnaturally. And the fact that we have not yet found them does not settle this in any definitive way. While the neural demands of some or all people can only be intelligently integrated in fact by supernatural operations, this need can only be determined from a supernatural act of understanding. (Fs) (notabene)

(iii) Third, schemes of recurrence in the physical, chemical and biological environments condition neural schemes. While these schemes are not without their importance, the schemes of the human world are far more influential in conditioning human consciousness. For the most part, our experiences come from the artifacts, expressions, and the deeds of other human beings, both living and deceased, especially because our attention gives these experiences greater prominence in the patterning of experience than it does those derived from the merely physical and biological environment. (Fs) (notabene)

55a Hence, there can be more or less natural human schemes of collaboration-schemes which are more or less consonant with human nature. In his "structure of the human good" (1972: 47-52), Lonergan worked out a second explanatory, invariant set of terms and relations. In that scheme, "capacities and needs" set a natural basis which human collaboration attempts to systematize. On the other hand, the criteria of the goods-particular goods, the intelligibility of goods of order, and terminal values-present standards for determining whether the schemes of collaboration meet or violate human nature. (Fs) (notabene)

55b Schemes of human collaboration are based upon shared meanings. These meanings include shared insights as to how to get things done and "what can be expected of the other fellow," shared judgments of what the situation actually is, shared judgments of value as to what the point to it all is, and shared interpersonal relations of respect, admiration, and love, or hostility, resentment, and hatred. The meanings become shared through processes of formal and informal education, where the expressions of one become experiences of others, sources for their questions, "What did that mean?" and eventually acts of consciousness which answer, or fail to answer, the questions. We would term "unnatural," therefore, any human collaboration which regularly pollutes its social atmosphere by introducing "any materials in any other arrangement and perspective" except those which would facilitate answers to certain questions and which makes it unlikely that understanding and judgment will occur. Instead it makes the occurrence of unnatural human living and decline increasingly probable. (Fs)