Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Lonergan, Liddy, Langer, Augustinus

Kurzinhalt: Langer - Lonergan, Liddys Erfahrung u. Erkenntnis, Idealismus -> Realismus, intellektuelle Konversion,

Textausschnitt: () What if every conscious act was reducible to imagination? I was not sure what insight was like. I was not sure I could situate it clearly in my own consciousness. I was not sure I 'had' it. (Students of Lonergan's thought regularly go through this period of insecurity, of oscillating back and forth between imagined possibilities. Where does this insecurity come from?)
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I remember saying something to myself like: 'Where is this act of insight?' And then it occurred to me: (206; Fs)
You're asking the wrong question!
Look at the question you're asking! You're asking a question that can't be answered! Asking 'where' is an attempt to visualize what can't be visualized. You're attempting to imagine what of its nature goes beyond imagination - that is, insight!
Indeed, you can be aware of the act of insight, understand it in its relationships with other cognitional acts, come to judge that understanding correct, but you can't see it! The very question you were asking was formulated in imaginative and visual terms and, as such, can't be answered.
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Confessions: (206; Fs)
My mind was in search of such images as the forms of my eye was accustomed to see; and I did not realize that the mental act by which I formed these images was not itself a bodily image (Confessions 7, 1).
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Intellectual conversion is rooted in the intellectual breakthroughs most of us have had throughout our years of education. But the full meaning of intellectual conversion is the full and conscious appropriation of our intellectual being, and indeed, our intellectual being in relation to the rest of our being - and to the universe. What I was implicitly looking for those days in Rome was the 'already out there now real' insight - something I could imagine. What I realized that day in the shower is that this is different than understanding understanding - or for that matter, any cognitional act.
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It was the growing sharp distinction between two types of knowing - one rooted in imagination, the other in intelligence - that was at the basis for my coming to know both the inadequacies of Langer's ultimate position in philosophy (in spite of her fine work on art), and the inadequacies of the scholastic philosophy I had been taught