Autor: Melchin, R. Kenneth

Buch: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Titel: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Stichwort: 1 Freiheit - Moral; wesentliche - tatsächliche Freiheit; Freiheit: verschiedene Auffassungen (Lonergan: Integration des neuralen Mannigfaltigen)

Kurzinhalt: The curious and distinctive feature of Lonergan's account of freedom is not his emphasis upon the role of intelligence. Rather, it is his integration of the statistical element.

Textausschnitt: 5.6 Freedom and Moral Life: Essential and Effective Freedom

52/5 There is no doubt that any discussion of moral life will require as a centrally constitutive element some account of the notion of freedom. And since the Enlightenment there has been an especially concerted effort and find in the notion of freedom that particular aspect of human nature which qualifies human practice as distinctively moral or responsible. In the first chapter of this book on Hegel and Modern Society,1 Charles Taylor introduces briefly the ethics of Kant as background for a subsequent analysis and evaluation of Hegel's political philosophy. Taylor characterizes Kant's moral thought as a protest against an earlier Enlightenment view of man as driven by desire. And in striving to find an a priori basis for moral action in the self-actuating or self-regulating activity of the rational will, Kant hoped to discover the grounds for man's liberation from the bondage of passion and natural inclination. In Taylor's view Kant saw in man's exercise of autonomous, self-regulating, rational will the act which constitutes man's life as free.2 In another introduction to Hegel's social theory, Herbert Marcuse describes Hegel's own account of freedom in similar terms, as the reflexively operative, self-regulating activity which lifts man above a final capitulation to externally determining conditions. (144; Fs)

But freedom is for Hegel an ontological category: it means being not a mere object, but the subject of one's existence; not succumbing to external conditions, but transforming factuality into realization.3

53/5 The term freedom has had a variety of different meanings, meanings that have been developed differently in various historical ages and which have manifested themselves in a variety of ethical theories.4 In one usage what is emphasized is the absence of restrictions. For example, a dog that is not caged or tied on a leash is considered free in this usage of the term. In another usage freedom is conceived in terms of its determining conditions. Here, to be free would mean that an event is not the result of the decisively determining operation of a unified set of antecedent causes or conditions. In Lonergan's terminology freedom here indicates the absence of system or pattern in a unified set of classical laws.5 In this sense the movement of electrons is considered free and a coin's movements throughout a fair toss is regarded as free. (145; Fs)

54/5 Lonergan's efforts to develop a concept of freedom can be seen in continuity with Kant's and Hegel's attempts to understand freedom in terms of man's self-regulative capacities. The argument or debate to which all three are opposed affirms (either explicity or implicitly) the pre-destined or determined character of human life which would preclude any notion of the subjective locus of human responsibility. Like Kant and Hegel, Lonergan sought to find in an understanding of man's reason, his rationality, his understanding, the key element of this reflexive or self-regulating capacity. The similarities and differences between Lonergan's account and those of Kant and Hegel cannot be explored here. But it is sufficient to note, at this point, the fact that all three thinkers set out to conceive the notion with similar objectives. (145; Fs)

Accordingly, an account of freedom has to turn to a study of intellect and will. In the coincidental manifolds of sensible presentations, practical insights grasp possible courses of action that are examined by reflection, decided upon by acts of willing and thereby either are or are not realized in the underlying sensitive flow. In this process there is to be discerned the emergence of elements of higher integration. For the higher integration effected on the level of human living consists of sets of courses of action, and these actions emerge inasmuch as they are understood by intelligent consciousness, evaluated by rational consciousness, and willed by rational self-consciousness [...]6 Man is free essentially inasmuch as possible courses of action are grasped by practical insight, motivated by reflection, and executed by decision.7

55/5 Freedom in this usage is not an absence but a presence; the presence of an actuated capacity to mediate the performance of sensorimotor acts and skills through the schemes or skills of intelligence. It is the actuated capacity to perform a scheme or groups of acts of cognition. But this cognition is not the knowing that terminates in a judgment of truth. Rather, it is the set of acts which grasp a possible course of action among a range of possibilities presented to the subject at a moment in world process, and which constitute an order or a pattern in a manifold of skills within the repertoire of a subject, in accordance with this conceived course of action. Some knowledge of fact is certainly necessary in the exercise of human freedom. But Lonergan's account of freedom in Insight does not define freedom in terms of knowledge of fact. (145f; Fs)

56/5 The curious and distinctive feature of Lonergan's account of freedom is not his emphasis upon the role of intelligence. Rather, it is his integration of the statistical element, his definition of f-probability and his related notion of emergence, into his accounts of intelligence and responsibility which is most original.8 In itself the notion of randomness, understood as the absence of a decisively determining, systematic unity of classical laws, is unsufficient to explain human freedom. For randomness does not explain the reflexive or self-regulating character that Kant and Hegel knew to be operative in human freedom. What is required is an explanation which includes some element of randomness in the relation between the freely performed act and its determining conditions, but which nonetheless recognizes the act as decisively self-regulating or self-integrating. (146; Fs)

57/5 Thus the explanation, in Lonergan's view, would require an emergent integration of a lower order manifold and a possible means for such an emergent integration to control its own form in a succession of reflexively operative recurrences. The neural manifold, its flexibly recurring aggregate of neurological events, the capacity for system or scheme to emerge and order or pattern such events in accordance with f-probabilities, the exigence for certain forms of integration, and the reflexive capacity to coordinate sense and motor skills in accordance with such an order or pattern are the essential elements in such an explanation. The condition of possibility <Möglichkeitsbedingung> for the emergence of new order or pattern Lonergan explains in terms of f-probably recurring events of a skill linking together in mutually conditioning sets or chains at the psychic level. And in this view the intricate set of neural pathways would seem to allow the capacity for emergent psychic patterns to operate on acquired sense and motor capacities, coordinating sets of skills in accordance with the emergent psychic order. It is the occurrence of such a set of acts (the actuation of this particular capacity, the performance of this skill) which designates a human action as essentially free. (146; Fs)