Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Understanding and Being

Titel: Understanding and Being

Stichwort: Erfahrung - Urteil; die Erfassung des virtuell Unbedingten sowohl by nature als auch in Abhängigkeit

Kurzinhalt: Judgment and Experience; Thomas über Habitus: das Ganze ist größer als der Teil -> Lonergans Erklärung: Übergang vom id qou zum id quod; Zusammenfassung (summary) über Finalität (a priori - a posteriori)

Textausschnitt: () When St Thomas discusses the habit of first principles, he gives a great deal of attention to the fact that the whole is greater than the part, and that that is fundamental in all cognitional theory. But he does not explain what he means. At least I found no text in which he did explain it. What might be the relevance of the whole being greater than the part, as something fundamental in all cognitional process, is the transition from the id quo to the id quod, ...
()
Now insofar as there is a requirement, a criterion of the virtually unconditioned, there is operative something that we have from nature; but insofar as we grasp the virtually unconditioned, we are dependent. We are certainly not knowing something, grasping something, that is absolutely independent of experience. You cannot have the fulfilment of the conditions for a virtually unconditioned without the experiential level, without the experience either of outer sense or of inner consciousness. Again, ... So the act of grasping the virtually unconditioned is in no sense absolutely independent of experience. 0n the other hand, the requirement that you have to have the virtually unconditioned if you are to judge, and that if you have the virtually unconditioned you cannot be rational and not judge - not without doing violence to your own rational consciousness - that is had from nature.
()
Briefly, then, the intention of being functions as a finality. It is radically from nature, and it functions in knowledge as a finality, a guide, a criterion, a requirement. It is absolutely transparent; it is not an a priori that determines what you will know, but it demands, it initiates, the process of knowing, guides the process, and sets criteria by which one carries out the process correctly or incorrectly. It sets the process going as inquiry, and it guides it by a requirement of intelligibility through which one effects the transition from essence to being, from essentia to ens.
()
To put the question in terms of independence, Is your knowing being independent of experience absolutely? The answer is simply, No, it is not absolutely independent. On the other hand. Is there anything in your knowing of being that comes from nature? Yes, there is but that which we have by nature is a perfect transparence. It does not prejudge any issue. ...
()
The a posteriori and the a priori, experiencing and not experiencing, however, are not the fundamental categories in which a satisfactory answer to the question is obtained. The fundamental categories are what we know by nature and what we know by acquisition.