Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Understanding and Being

Titel: Understanding and Being

Stichwort: Menschheit: allgemeine Materie und Form; Mensch: Form + Materie im Hinblick auf Sein; id quo -> id quod

Kurzinhalt: Understanding and Experience; Bilder (image) nicht bloß Anreiz für Einsicht, sondern ihr Objekt wie Farbe für Sicht; abstract essence, particularized essence; von der Wesenheit zum Seienden

Textausschnitt: () ... images are not simply an occasion for insight, as Plato held; they are not simply a disposition, as Avicenna held, but they are the object. The images present to our intellects, to our understanding, their object. And he quotes the familiar phrase from Aristotle that images stand to understanding as colors stand to sight. The image is an object with respect to the insight: it is the object in the same sense as the color is the object of seeing.
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There is a point to notice about the intelligibility of the image. Qua image, it is simply potential intelligibility, it is not actually intelligible; qua understood, it is the intelligible in act, identical with the act of understanding. Color as seen is not on the wall actually, it is there potentially; color as seen is identical with the act of seeing. Not that the intelligibility grasped is only in the act of understanding: it is potentially in the imaged from the fact that the image causes it.
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... There are three cases: abstract essence, 'humanity'; particularized essence, 'this instance of humanity'; and the universal or particular thing, 'man' or 'this man.'
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By your insight into the image you are able to formulate the conditions, the elements in the image, necessary to having the insight. If you see in this circle that the curve must be perfectly round if all of the radii are equal, if that is what insight grasps in the image, then you can proceed to the definition of a circle, which is something like a definition of man. But you can proceed in more abstract fashion. You can select simply what is grasped by insight, namely, necessity and the conditions for that necessity, and then you have an abstract essence. Implicit definitions are of this sort.
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When the content of the insight into the phantasm is formulated in a conception, the conception may simply express form and common matter, and then you have 'humanity' or 'circularity.' It may express individual matter and form, and then you have 'this instance of humanity' or 'this instance of circularity.' Or, you can go further, and in the form and individual matter understand the full potentiality of being, and then you make the step from the id quo to the id quod
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<Noch einmal>
If you think simply of the insight and the experiential data, then what you formulate is just how much of the data is necessary for having the insight, and you get abstract essence. Recalling the example of the circle, you have to have a plane surface, a curve, and equality of all radii; but you need not have this plane, this curve, and radii of this size, because that is irrelevant. If you consider the process, as starting from insight into phantasm, as heading towards conception, as concerned with picking out the essential, you get abstract essence - humanity, or circularity, so to speak - form and common matter. If you think of this process as serving a different end, if you have grasped the abstract essence and you want to consider this instance of it, then, since what is operating is an intelligent consciousness, you can pick out the data that de facto fall under the present insight, and you get a particularized essence, this instance of humanity. But insofar as this wonder, this inquiry, represents a fundamental finality, intelligence grasps, when it goes on to the particularized essence, the potentiality of being.
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The insight and the experience together can give you either an abstract essence or a particularized essence, depending on your point of view; but insofar as that essence satisfies the requirements of intelligence with respect to its finality, insofar as it meets the criterion of intrinsic intelligibility, you move from essence to being, from the id quo to the id quod.