Autor: Melchin, R. Kenneth

Buch: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Titel: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Stichwort: 4 Freiheit - Moral; wesentliche - tatsächliche Freiheit (essential - effective freedom)

Kurzinhalt: this distinction between essential and effective freedom can provide the key to understanding how ... psychological, historical conditions can operate to shape and delimit the f-probabilities associated with classes of human performance with

Textausschnitt: 64/5 This introduces the third and last qualification. The occurrence of an intelligent act integrating a manifold of performance skills qualifies that performance as essentially free. But there is a vast different between essential freedom and its various ranges of flexibility. And so in order to explain the apparent fact of levels or degrees of developed responsibility, and in order to account for the massively conditioned character of human life, Lonergan introduces a distinction between essential and effective freedom. 'The difference between essential and effective freedom is the difference between a dynamic structure and its operational range.'1 Effective freedom is the measure of limitations and conditions, both immanent to the subject and proper to his or her historical environment, corresponding to the f-probable occurrence of more diverse ranges of acts and skills within the subject's operative repertoire.2 (148f; Fs) (notabene)

65/5 Effective freedom involves the external circumstances of the subject's life and the subject's own sensitive, intelligent and responsible states of habit, routine or development.3 Lonergan notes briefly the way in which each of these types of conditions affects the subject's effective freedom. But an elaboration of the structure and the import of this presentation would be in order here. For while Lonergan's account of responsible practice focuses on the role of the practical insight in selecting among possible courses of action and in constituting an order in a subjective (or, as we will see in chapter six below, in an intersubjective) set of performance skills, the fact is that subjects are most usually limited in the range of possibilities open to them. In my view this distinction between essential and effective freedom can provide the key to understanding how social, economic, psychological, historical conditions can operate to shape and delimit the f-probabilities associated with classes of human performance without obliterating man's essential freedom. Furthermore this account explains how effective freedom, won principally through the conversions, and operative personally in the lives of subjects, constitutes the condition and the locus of social transformation. (149; Fs)

66/5 In Lonergan's account of the practical, transformative skills in the dramatic pattern of experience, the human subject stands linked into a huge number of recurrence schemes which involve circles of events within his or her own envelope of skin and events of the more or less remote 'external,' biological, intersubjective, social, economic, historical environment. Such schemes includes the nutritional and respiratory cycles, the visual; auditory, tactile, olfactory cycles linking the coordination of muscles and organs to the various sensory responses, the social and linguistic cycles of gesture and role-taking, the economic cycles wherein recurrent actions link together with those of other members of an economy to yield circles of exchange, and historical cycles wherein the dreams of one generation become the routines of another for building the promise of the future. (149; Fs)
67/5 Like the carbon atom the human subject is ineluctably social. But unlike the carbon atom the human subject's sociality is operative on a number of complex, interlocking levels. For a number of the schemes linking the 'inside' and the 'outside' of this envelope have the curious ability to order or coordinate the routine functioning and interacting of other events and schemes. The most significant examples of such coordinating schemes are those involving the cognitional emergence of unities that integrate non-systematic manifolds of neural demand functions, thus constituting an order in what would otherwise be a cacaphony of sensory 'experiences,' or a hodgepodge of muscular movements. This immanent emergence occurs at first non-systematically for it is a structuration occuring spontaneously given the fulfillment of the necessary conditions. But as an emergence its f-probably systematized recurrence can be increased in the context of such developmental and intersubjective routines as pedagogy, parental example and apprenticeship. In this way the operative integrations in the practical life of a culture are drawn from the common font of a sedimented heritage of a succession of civilizations. The emergent integrations remain personal events inasmuch as the locus of their occurrence is the neural manifold of the subject and inasmuch as the fulfilling conditions need to occur and recur within the appropriate spatial and temporal range relative to the subject's neural manifold. But inasmuch as the integrations themselves are of classes, and the classes are common to subjects in cultures, the integrating acts that mediate and coordinate the routines, the anticipations, the memories and hopes of a culture are fully public. (149f; Fs)

68/5 The term essential freedom denotes the fact that the manifold of skills within the repertoire of any human subject is open to the possibility of such an emergent integration occurring in the context of a scheme of acts involving a selection among projected alternatives and modification through feedback cycles.4 Because such integrations occur and recur in accordance with f-probabilities, the human subject is not locked into the determining constraints of biological, psychological or social conditioning. But because biological, psychological and social conditions are mediated to the neural manifold through the operation of countless recurrence schemes, such conditions operate to shift the f-probabilities associated with various classes of integrations. For this reason the subject is social. (150; Fs)

69/5 Furthermore the most significant fact about practically integrating skills is the way in which they function to transform subjective spontaneity, and thus to condition or shape the f-probabilities associated with the course of subsequent performance. Since the generally current practical routines of economy, society and polity will not be authored individually by the majority of subjects but will be established in accordance with the operative exigencies in each of these realms, there will be patterns in the flows of practical and theoretical insights in accordance with historical patterns in such exigencies. As operative routines shape daily experience such experience gives rise to corresponding insights. And as operative routines are themselves transformed in accordance with historically dynamic patterns in the transformation of economic, social and political life, such routines will mediate (both systematically and non-systematically) such patterns to the flows of cognitional acts of subjects. Such patterns of 'conditioning' do not preclude essential freedom. For the capacity for emergent integration in a scheme involving cognitional projection, selection and feedback modification remains. (150; Fs)

70/5 However, there also exists a set of skills wherein the subject can refine progressively the genesis of such operative integrations in accordance with his or her own reflexively transforming anticipations, in a scheme of intersubjective exchange wherein his or her own anticipations and those of another are assessed critically, and in the interests of the ongoing development of the capacity to constitute systematically his or her own subsequent capacities. The term 'effective freedom' denotes the fact that the emergent integration of the subject's skills stands as an act within a set of acts wherein the subject can effect such an integration in one of a number of possible ways, and that the range of possibilities open to him or her at a point in time can be expanded or restricted, through the operation of social, historical, and psychological conditions as well as through the subject's developed skills of modifying or transforming his or her own 'praxis,' and subsequent lines of development in such 'praxis.'5 (150f; Fs) (notabene)

71/5 Because the emergent integrations are inertial (in the absence of intervening conditions) and because they reorder the subject's spontaneous engagement with his or her own environment, the practical, linguistic, cognitional skills of culture, once learned, recur spontaneously with the presence of fulfilling conditions. Consequently the practical routines of culture do not only proliferate, they also endure. But because the experiential life of subjects involves not only the recurring schemes of society, economy, polity, but also the random interactions among events in these schemes and events of the other 'natural' routines of his or her environment, this experiential life will undergo a continual process of transformation. And so essential to the 'welfare' of subjects will be a dynamic flexibility in their development and modification of skills. For this reason the notion of 'effective freedom' pertains, in a minor way, to the social, economic, cultural conditions that restrict the proliferation of determinate practical forms. But in a major way effective freedom pertains to the developmental skills wherein subjects become capable of modifying their own skilled, practical spontaneity in accordance with the shifting exigences of culture on the move. And social, economic, cultural conditions remain relevant to this second, major, instance of effective freedom. But they will function to increase the f-probabilities associated with such dynamic, developmental skills only insofar as they enhance rather than supplant this reflexively operative flexibility. Conversely in this analysis the transformation of the social, economic, cultural conditions of life will exacerbate the problems of culture on the move to the extent that they are not directed towards increasing the occasion for and the f-probability of developing personally constitutive, integrative skills. (151; Fs) (notabene)

72/5 Such is Lonergan's distinction between essential and effective freedom. At its centre stands the emergent cognitional event integrating ranges of performance skills and the reflexively operative scheme of acts whose implementation shapes the content of this integration. In any learning process the role of this cognitional integration scheme is clear and obvious, not as 'knowledge of facts' but as a cognitional anticipation or projection of a possible course of action, and a hit-and-miss process of ordering the elements of the skill in a feedback cycle of progressively refining stages until the elements 'come together.' Anyone who has learned recently to drive a car, to play 'double stops' on a violin, to lay bricks, to write essays, to write poems, will remember the agonies associated with this cognitional anticipation and with its mediating role in assembling the succession of stages and identifying the elements to be integrated. (151f; Fs) (notabene)

73/5 Similarly in any practical or moral dilemma the role of this cognitional scheme in its linked set of operations stands clear and obvious. For a dilemma most usually demands a response in the absence of a clear differentiation of the superior alternative. But most profoundly, and perhaps least obviously, this cognitional scheme mediates the concrete application of socially current 'praxis' to the ever-shifting conditions and situations of day to day living. Without the flexibility associated with the more or less restricted ranges of effective freedom the concrete practical implementation of the routines of culture could never occur. Indeed, because of the powerful way in which operative routines shape and orientate collective spontaneity, the concern for collective responsibility must turn to this conditioning relationship between operative routines and the f-probabilities associated with classes of insights and judgments of truth and value. But because the solutions to the continually arising problems of culture on the move requires the ongoing genesis of skills and the ongoing modification of practical routines in accordance with the shifting demands of randomly and systematically interacting conditions, this central role of the personal, emergent cognitional integration can never be supplanted. (152; Fs)