Autor: Melchin, R. Kenneth

Buch: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Titel: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Stichwort: Ethik und Geschichte 4; Grundierung von Werten; Fortschritt - Niedergang; Gegenposition

Kurzinhalt: ... the criteria of progress and decline link the subject to the objective moral world inasmuch as a 'terminal value'1 is a true value when the subject appropriates the dynamism of progress immanent in the very act of choosing.

Textausschnitt: 6.6 Ethics and History II: The Foundations of Value

86/6 This last section of chapter six begins where the fifth chapter left off, with a question about the foundation of value and its relationship to the overarching course of history. There would seem to be a spontaneous and habitual concern for selecting among alternate possible courses of action and for seeking out criteria for choosing appropriately. Is this spontaneous concern an intelligently grounded one? Even if clear criteria for selection remain to be found in concrete areas of moral life, can the search for criteria be expected to bear fruit at all? Or is the search to be pronounced vain? And if the search is not vain, then will deciding and living in the light of such criteria have any impact at all upon the overarching course of history? (195; Fs)

87/6 Lonergan's discussions of 'the human good' in Insight, chapter eighteen, and in Method, chapter two, link moral value with his notions of progress and decline.1 But the two sets of texts deal with two different dimensions of the relationship between moral responsibility and the course of historical progress and decline. Insight, chapter eighteen, deals with the foundational elements operative in the dynamic structure of rational self-consciousness. Progress and decline are the objects of responsible choice, but they are also the dynamic orientation, the act of choosing itself. Consequently the criteria of progress and decline link the subject to the objective moral world inasmuch as a 'terminal value'2 is a true value when the subject appropriates the dynamism of progress immanent in the very act of choosing.3 Method, on the other hand, speaks of historical progress and decline as proceeding from subjects who are themselves instances of originated value.4 Here progress and decline are not so much a part of the choice of value as they are the result of a subject (and indeed a group of subjects) living their lives as authentic, self-transcending, 'converted'5 human persons, the originators of value. Consequently the discussion that follows will have two parts. (196; Fs) (notabene)

(1) In Insight, chapter eighteen, the focus is upon the structure of the act of responsible choice as the foundation for the criteria for choosing. (196; Fs)

For the root of ethics, as the root of metaphysics, lies neither in sentences nor in propositions nor in judgments but in the dynamic structure of rational self-consciousness. Because that structure is latent and operative in everyone's choosing, it is universal on the side of the subject; because that structure can be dodged, it grounds a dialectical criticism of subjects. Again, because that structure is recurrent in every act of choice, it is universal on the side of the object; and because its universality consists not in abstraction but in inevitable recurrence, it also is concrete.6

88/6 A person's act of integrating his or her own acquired skills to effect an ordering of a manifold of materials of an environment has the structure of an emergent integration of a lower order manifold. Furthermore even to conceive a course of action and to consider its relative merits in anticipation of performance is to give evidence that an emergent integration has already occurred at the level of cognition, and that a further dynamic orientation towards emergence is operative at the level of responsible action. It is not simply that a moral subject faces a choice between courses of action which will either realize or prevent emergence (or a sustained course of emergence in development). Rather, the very act of considering two alternatives is itself evidence that an emergence has already occurred. The 'considering' has the dynamic structure of an emergence, and the act of choosing actuates a further emergence. The problem of moral value arises only insofar as an integrative act of conceiving two possibilities has already occurred. The responsible act of weighing the two alternatives is oriented towards a further emergence and this is constituted when the decision is made and the act is carried out. And so a decision as to whether to effect or to reject the normative orientation of development is itself an instance of such an orientation. If development is to be denied, either in a concrete case or as a general principle, it can only be denied through an instance of its own occurrence. And so the question arises as to whether a subject can reasonably repudiate something in principle that is actuated in the very act of repudiation. (196f; Fs) (notabene)

89/6 It is this question that is at stake in Lonergan's queer and repeated insistence upon promoting the 'positions' and reversing the 'counter-positions.'7 In humans the events whose recurrence ensures routine operation throughout individual lives are not only the respiration of oxygen, the procurement and ingestion of food, the elimination of wastes, and the raising and caring of young. More significantly, they are the dialectical interplay between the subject's 'interior' environment and his or her drive to order or coordinate that environment in accordance with psychic acts. In terms of emergent probability, what I am as human is a dynamically ordered set of physical, chemical, botanical, zoological schemes whose events include both occurrences within the spatial confines of a body, and events that occur beyond those confines. The complete set of processes that flow within and through me involves sets of higher integrations of manifolds of events that occur in accordance with exigent states of the manifolds. The relative correspondence of the integral pattern to the demands of the manifold either drives the psyche toward renewed attempts at integration or sets it to rest with the satisfaction of v-probable correspondence (only to find that the act of integration has given rise to a new form or instance of Sorge.) The dynamic operation of this dialectic is the structure of the scheme of judging value and deciding to act in the light of such judgments. And so the decision to affirm or to repudiate the principle of development, and to actuate or to refuse this principle in an act of progress or decline, is a decision whose content seeks to approximate a correspondence with the operative structure of its own occurrence. (197; Fs)

90/6 When the content of a judgment or decision does not approximate such a correspondence with the intelligibility immanent in the structure of the performance of the act, the exigence of the neural manifold drives intelligence to keep raising further questions, attending to new data, adopting new perspectives. Lonergan's examples of the various types of efforts to dodge self-knowledge are put forward as evidence of the power of this drive towards correspondence.8 And his account of the dramatic bias and its effects is an example of what distortions ensue when this drive is repressed or prematurely laid to rest.9 (197; Fs)

91/6 The affirmation of a counter-position is understood by Lonergan as an occurrence of a cognitional or responsible event which seeks to order the experiential manifold of a subject in accordance with an order or a pattern which, if it were true, would prevent the cognitional or responsible event from occurring. The spontaneity of intelligence is to continue rejecting such incongruity until isomorphism is approached or until the operator is deformed in his or her capacity. And so the grasp and affirmation of positions constitute the development of the subject while the affirmation of counter-positions sets the subject on the road towards decline. Furthermore since practical acts in humans have the effect of constituting the spontaneity and the habitual orientation of successive acts of the subject, the choice of development not only avoids the deformations that ensue from bias but it also sets the orientation of the subject in anticipation of further instances and manifestations of development. This is the cumulative and progressive character of development which was discussed above. And in this fashion the choice of progress has the effect of constituting the subject as an instance of originating value.10 (197f; Fs) (notabene)