Autor: Melchin, R. Kenneth

Buch: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Titel: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Stichwort: Biologisches Erfahrungsmuster

Kurzinhalt: The biological pattern is characterized principally by its orientation towards securing the continued life of the organism and its species.

Textausschnitt: 35/5 The biological pattern is characterized principally by its orientation towards securing the continued life of the organism and its species.1 And here we begin to see how Lonergan starts building a foundation for an ethics. The most primitive biological operations of human persons would seem to have a structure that is oriented recurrently towards a set of goals. The routines or recurring schemes of 'sensations, memories, images, conations, emotions and bodily movements,' themselves intricate combinations of more elemental biological events and schemes, 'converge upon terminal activities of intussusception or reproduction or, when negative in scope, self-preservation.'2 The schemes take up the materials of the organism's environment and transform them in the 'interest,' so to speak, of the organism's well-being. When the organism becomes 'conscious'3 the schemes remain, nonetheless, more successful (more rapid, more effective, more efficient) means for attaining these biological ends.4 And while the biological ends concern principally the immanent aspects of the organism's functioning, the greater success of the conscious operations is to be accounted for in terms of the organism's new-found capacity for systematic or controlled attention or 'concern' for the 'external' environment.5 (138f; Fs)

Thus extroversion is a basic characteristic of the biological pattern of experience. The bodily basis of the senses in sense organs, the functional correlation of sensations with the positions and movements of the organs, the imaginative, conative, emotive consequences of sensible presentations, and the resulting local movements of the body, all indicate that elementary experience is concerned, not with the immanent aspects of living, but with its external conditions and opportunities. Within the full pattern of living, there is a partial, intermittent, extroverted pattern of conscious living.6

36/5 There is a very narrow role played by the operations of intelligence within the biological pattern, a role that can be illustrated by any recollection of an occasion of hunger and the subsequent steps that were taken to procure food. But the point to be made here is that the organism in the biological pattern spontaneously brings into play any skills within its repertoire and integrates their performance in any one of a large number of possible schemes oriented towards relieving a state of biological distress or achieving a biological goal.7 It is this orientation that distinguishes the biological pattern, and it is this structured relationship towards the materials of the organism's environment that qualifies the routines of the biological pattern as a first, most basic instance of a practice or transformative activity. (139; Fs)