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

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

Titel: Flanagan, J., Insight: Chapters 1-5

Stichwort: Potenz; Unterschied: empirisches Residuum (empirical residue) - inverse Einsicht

Kurzinhalt: Thus inverse insight is a deliberate abstraction from questions because you know they are misleading; while empirical residue refers to those aspects of experience that scientists spontaneously abstract from because ...

Textausschnitt: 91b Both these topics deal with the process of abstraction, but with an important difference. Inverse insights ground a major reorientation of the way you wonder or, phrased negatively, inverse insights permit you to abstract, from questions that were misleading, your prior inquiries. Inverse insights reveal that you were asking the wrong questions. Empirical residue is a broader category and refers to the way that scientists abstract from particular places and times or from particular things without noticing that they are doing so. Thus inverse insight is a deliberate abstraction from questions because you know they are misleading; while empirical residue refers to those aspects of experience that scientists spontaneously abstract from because their minds are spontaneously oriented toward the intelligible and so they realize there is nothing intelligible to be found in certain aspects of experience, such as particular places and particular times. (Fs)

91c First, note that the category of empirical residue points to the mind's natural potency for seeking light, while inverse insight points up the mind's tendency to mistake darkness for light. It is startling that throughout the history of Western culture certain of the most brilliant thinkers spent a great deal of time searching for nothing. They called it by different names such as the void, absolute space and absolute time, and the aether; but in every case after several hundred years of assuming its existence they discovered that nothing is just that-nothing. Yet even after the discovery that nothing is nothing, later thinkers started assuming its existence again. The paradox, then, is that inverse insight is about the mind's ability to spend two or three hundred or thousand years searching for the wrong things because of asking the wrong question while empirical residue is about the mind's natural ability to turn away from certain experiences because they are not in themselves intelligible. The clue to understanding both ideas is that each pertains to potency. (Fs)

92a Potency, as I have noted, is a tension of opposites. From one point of view potency is a limit or boundary and is not directly intelligible; but from another point of view potency is an invitation to go beyond barriers. Potency, then, is not itself intelligible but is intelligible only through form and act. Or to put it another way, potency is a limit and a limit, though not itself directly intelligible, becomes intelligible through its relation to other limits; and both relations and limits become actually intelligible through insight. If you ask, "what is a limit?" you are barking up the wrong tree. But the clue I am pursuing is that empirical residue refers to limits that the mind spontaneously abstracts from without being able to give account of its own orientation towards the light; inverse insight, on the other hand, is not just an abstraction, but a clear grasp of the mind's own ability to transcend limits by making limits changeable or transformable. With this distinction in mind I turn to chapter two and its relation to chapter four. (Fs)