Autor: Melchin, R. Kenneth

Buch: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Titel: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Stichwort: Allgemeine Befangenheit; langer Zyklus, Niedergang (General Bias and Decline); Common sense; Machiavelli

Kurzinhalt: Most simply, the distinctive characteristic associated with the operation of the general bias is the restricted horizon or viewpoint within which common sense (practical) intelligence operates.

Textausschnitt: 7.6.2 General Bias and Decline

65/7 The general bias concerns the insufficiently developed and infrequently actuated capacities and skills of intelligent, responsible knowing and doing.1 The normal routines of human life are massively constituted by the common and more or less novel mediating activities of theoretical and practical intelligence. Such activities are performed in accordance with developed capacities and within the confines of corresponding cultural, economic, social, historical conditions and limitations. The simple fact about human life that is expressed in the notion of general bias is that the problems encountered most regularly throughout human life demand a general level of developed capacities and skills in excess of that which is commonly operative. This fact is true not only of aggregates of persons, but also of the course of any one person's life. And the consequence of this fact is that human attempts to order human life in accordance with the immanent norms of developed intelligence quite regularly fail. Finally, by specifying the essential problem in the human condition as insufficiently developed skills, this view paints a substantially gloomier picture than that of Marx. This view certainly lends itself to a consideration of the social, cultural, economic and psychological conditions surrounding the development and exercise of skills. But unlike Marx's view, Lonergan's view permits no shortcuts around the basic requirement that each and every human being acquire, develop and exercise the relevant capacities and skills. This, I would argue, is the reason for Lonergan's endless preoccupation with 'the subject.' For I can never acquire or exercise a skill for another person.2 (233; Fs) (notabene)

66/7 Lonergan's account of the human condition in terms of the general bias does not rest with noting the recurrent fact of failure. Rather, he goes on to discuss the particular characteristics of failure which result from the operation of the general bias and the historical consequences of its impact. Most simply, the distinctive characteristic associated with the operation of the general bias is the restricted horizon or viewpoint within which common sense (practical) intelligence operates. (233f; Fs) (notabene)

The lag of intellectual development, its difficulty and its apparently meagre returns bear in an especial manner on common sense. It is concerned with the concrete and the particular. It entertains no aspirations about reaching abstract and universal laws. It is easily led to rationalize its limitations by engendering a conviction that other forms of human knowledge are useless or doubtfully valid. Every specialist runs the risk of turning his specialty into a bias by failing to recognize and appreciate the significance of other fields. Common sense almost invariably makes that mistake; for it is incapable of analyzing itself, incapable of making the discovery that it too is a specialized development of human knowledge, incapable of coming to grasp that its peculiar danger is to extend its legitimate concern for the concrete and the immediately practical into disregard of larger issues and indifference to long-term results.3 (notabene)


67/7 Lonergan's call for a higher viewpoint, a wider perspective on man and history within which to understand the specialized operations of common sense, recalls Dilthey's efforts to set the groundwork for his fundamental science of man. And Lonergan is explicit in conceiving his higher viewpoint as analogous, in intent, to Marx's historical theory. (234; Fs)
So far from granting common sense a hegemony in practical affairs, the foregoing analysis leads to the strange conclusion that common sense has to aim at being subordinated to a human science that is concerned, to adapt a phrase from Marx, not only with knowing history but also with directing it. For common sense is unequal to the task of thinking on the level of history. It stands above the scotosis of the dramatic subject, above the egoism of the individual, above the bias of dominant and of depressed but militant groups that realize only the ideas they see to be to their immediate advantage. But the general bias of common sense prevents it from being effective in realizing ideas, however appropriate and reasonable, that suppose a long view or that set up higher integrations or that involve the solution of intricate and disputed issues.4

68/7 The historical consequence of the operation of the general bias is the emergence of a dynamic trend that stands in opposition to the drive of finality towards successively higher emergent integrations. Lonergan calls this inverse trend 'the longer cycle of decline.' And the central characteristic of this trend is the 'neglect of ideas to which all groups are rendered indifferent by the general bias of common sense.'5 The reason why the general bias yields this trend is to be understood in terms of the fact that history is constituted by meaning.6 The insights made operative in one age set the conditions for life in the next age. If common sense is generally prone to restricting its horizons of operation to the realm of the immediate and practical, then the alternating cycles of group bias consistently will fail to discover and to implement the insights that would serve the good of all. For the group bias turns the operation of intelligence to serve the interests of the group. In addition, since the data base of common sense is the common experience of life in that age, every narrow viewpoint of common sense that is made operative will set the experiential range of the successive age. As long as common sense excludes insights that are relevant to understanding and directing the whole of life (the distinctive characteristic of common sense's operation), it will bequeath upon the next generation an ever-narrowing data base for the discovery and regulation of human affairs.7 (234f; Fs) (notabene)

69/7 Like the other biases, the general bias is not merely negative. It is not only an exclusion of complete insights. Rather, like the other biases the general bias involves the subject in a dialectical tension with the exigencies of his or her intersubjective experience. The partial insights of common sense result in a distortion of the subject's experiential manifold. And so subsequent insights and practical decisions begin conforming more and more to the distorted experiential base. But the general bias involves its own peculiar form of distortion, a distortion that is more serious than those of the other biases. For insufficiently developed intelligence with its shrunken or delimited horizons does not grasp the need for growth. And as ever-narrower points of view gain wider and wider acceptance, insufficiently developed intelligence pronounces theoretical issues to be irrelevant. The result is that common sense not only finds itself insufficiently developed, it also judges further development to be impossible or irrelevant. (235; Fs) (notabene)

70/7 The cycle of decline has a number of distinct implications. And Lonergan's presentation of these implications is cast as a dramatic monologue which mounts from a technical restatement of the elements of the longer cycle, through the history of the growing irrelevance of religion and philosophy to a graphic portrayal of the barbarism of Hitler's Germany. One could speculate on the names, dates, places and events to which Lonergan alludes. And in some cases little imagination would be required. But throughout the monologue Lonergan's principal target is that particular form of insufficiently developed intelligence which manifests itself in a repudiation of intelligence. The narrowed horizons of common sense practicality with its short-term preoccupation with solving the problems at hand using the immediately available tools gives rise to a commonly operative theory which judges the theoretical issues, the general of ultimate good, the foundations of truth, to be irrelevant speculation. And to illustrate this narrowing of horizons in the field of political philosophy, Fred Lawrence quotes Leo Strauss in identifying Machiavelli as a key figure in the history of this shift towards short-term practicality: (235; Fs)

The initiator of the shift from the medieval synthesis into that succession of lower syntheses characteristic of socio-cultural decline was Machiavelli who, in the fifteenth chapter of his odd little book. The Prince, wrote the fateful words: '[...] many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his preservation. A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good. Therefore it is necessary for a prince who wishes to maintain himself to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge and not use it according to the necessity of the case.'8

71/7 The general bias with its longer cycle of decline concerns the failure of the development of intelligence in its various schemes of operation with its respective transformations. Intelligence which neglects or refuses to understand itself places an insurmountable obstacle in the path of its long range development. And since common sense intelligence looks to the data of contemporary experience for the source of its insights, the mounting exclusion of theoretical insights on man from the normal range of experience gives rise to the growing conviction that such insights are neither possible nor relevant. It is claimed that the truth about humanity is not to be found in an analysis of his capacities or her potentialities. Rather, it is to be discovered in generalizations from common performance. And when such generalizations are put forward as the only plausible norms for subsequent performance, then every subsequent stage is bound to conform to the past age's incomplete understanding of itself. The only norms for intelligent performance are current or recently past general performance. And so intelligence, both in its speculative and in its regulative or moral operations, becomes 'radically uncritical.' For it has rejected its own immanent norm of 'progress,' in favour of the extrinsic and arbitrary norm of current practice.9 (236; Fs) (notabene)