Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Understanding and Being

Titel: Understanding and Being

Stichwort: Begriff (notion) des Seins; Sein als Zielobjekt der Vernunft

Kurzinhalt: The Notion of Being, Sein als Ausdruck eines uneingeschränkten Strebens; intellect: potens omnia facere et fieri; Sein als Objekt des transitiven Verbs "wissen"; Obskurantismus

Textausschnitt: () When St Thomas wants to prove that the object of our intellect is ens, he adduces the Aristotelian account of intellect, the potens omnia facere et fieri, able to make and become all things, a potential omnipotence, and he says that because it is omnia, it is ens, being. ... Being, then, is a final object, the term of an unrestricted tendency, desire, effort to know. We work towards it. As through imagination we have an immanently produced object, an image, and through the image have a representation of what is imagined, so through understanding and judgment we have immanently produced objects, what is conceived and what is affirmed, through which we know what is, being. And that being can be considered in either of two ways, distributively or collectively. Distributively, one talks about beings; collectively, one talks about the totality of everything that is.
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If being is the object towards which our intellectual knowledge tends, then to know is to know being; being is the object of the transitive verb 'to know.' We have a fundamental identity: intellectual knowing of the type we have described and explained is identical with knowing being.
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If your intellect were something that was confined within a finite range, then there could possibly be questions that you could brush aside without any reason whatever, and so a certain measure of radical obscurantism would be justified. But if no obscurantism whatever is justified, then in principle there is no finite limit to our knowing.