Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Understanding and Being

Titel: Understanding and Being

Stichwort: natürliche "Erkenntnis" Gottes, Sein als a priori by nature; Sein als das zuerst Erkannte (Thomas)

Kurzinhalt: The Notion of Being as Natural; Erkenntis von Natur aus und durch Erwerb; Engel, Möglichkeit zu Erkennen und intellectus agens by nature; natural desire to know God; knowing being is natural insofar

Textausschnitt: () First, in ordinary scholastic terms the distinction is between what is known by nature and what is known by acquisition.
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Consequently, while by nature we have knowing in potency, it is by acquisition that we move to knowing in act. Our potency to know, our capacity to know, is from nature, but any actual knowing involves some influence from the object. ... An object is needed to effect the transition from the potency to see to. the act of seeing. Again, sight sees nothing but the colored, the luminous; by nature it is restricted to that. The potency determines the range of possible objects attained by ocular vision.
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So, in traditional theory, with regard to intellectual knowledge we have by nature the agent intellect that uses our sensible knowledge to produce acts of understanding. The capacity to understand, the agent intellect, the sensitive potencies, and correlations among these three are from nature; but an actuation of the process requires, first, the actual perceptions and the formation of images, and then the intervention of inquiry at that occasion.
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Moreover, in intellect the habits of science in general are all acquired. The human intellect, at the start, is like a blackboard on which nothing is written. It is only gradually that we acquire the sciences. Still, there is a reference to something known by nature in Aristotle, namely, the principle of contradiction, and in St Thomas the habitus principiorum is described not as an acquired habit but as a natural habit. ... St Thomas also affirms that being is naturally known. Just as sense - sight, for example - is a potency that by nature is determined to a certain range of possible objects, so also intellect has by nature a determinate range. It is potens omnia facere et fieri; its range is everything. According to St Thomas, because its range is everything, its range is being.
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St Thomas also speaks of a natural desire to know God by his essence. ... A desire to know God by his essence is something natural. It is not something acquired, produced in us, something we get out of objects.
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In the doctrine found in St Thomas there is the equation between knowing and knowing being: knowing is natural; therefore, knowing being is natural. Being is somehow a priori? The answer to that problem is that traditionally being is said to be known by nature; it is natural knowledge.
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If we acknowledge a natural habit, if we acknowledge that there are not only acquired habits in the intellect, but that there is also a natural habit of first principles on which absolutely everything else depends, then ... Knowing is natural, and therefore knowing being is natural. Knowing being is natural insofar as we have natural potencies and some natural habits. The whole of our knowing is not by acquisition, by the action of objects on us; part of it is had from nature. We have some resemblance to God, who is completely independent of all objects, and to the angels, who are largely independent of objects.
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The fundamental moment in the notion of being lies in the capacity to wonder and reflect, and that as potency we have from nature. If a person naturally does not have the capacity to wonder, to be surprised by what he sees or hears or feels, to ask why, to ask what's happening, what's up then there is no remedy; there is nothing we can do. We cannot endow people with intelligence. Intelligence fundamentally is this capacity to ask questions, and this capacity is entirely from nature.
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Because our questions are about being, and the range of our capacity for asking questions is unlimited, being is absolutely universal and absolutely concrete, the object towards which knowing moves.
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What our knowing aims at is knowing everything about everything. On the level of potency, this is from nature, and it is independent of experience. We must have it to be able to ask questions, to wonder, to set the process going. However, the occurrence of actual wonder, actual inquiry, is not absolutely independent of experience. ... The potency is from nature; the exercise involves experience.