Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Understanding and Being

Titel: Understanding and Being

Stichwort: Metaphysik, Dialektik zw. desire to know und "Welt" (Sorge); Kriterium: Realität, Objektivität

Kurzinhalt: Definition of Metaphysics, The Underlying Problem, Nacht des Mystikers, Spannung zw. Welt u. pure desire to know, 3 Elemente einer Dialektik

Textausschnitt: () ... we acknowledge a pure desire to know correlated with a universe of being. On the subjective side there is a desire to know by correct understanding in true judgment, and the objective of this desire is a universe of being whose reality corresponds to the totality of true judgments - knowing everything about everything. () Now this universe of being is not identical with 'my world' - Heidegger' s Welt.
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The night of sense of the mystics is the destruction of one's Welt, but our aim is not to destroy it or to bring it into coincidence with the universe of being, or to transpose it into that universe, but rather to highlight the idea of the real, and so to remove the conflict.
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The trouble, then, lies with the notion of the real. Is the real to be identified with the universe of being, or is it to be settled by my autobiography? ... But the pure desire to know can also become a dominant Sorge, and then, though there will not be a complete elimination of merely personal concern, still this world of one's concern will move into coincidence with the universe of being.
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Now if our view is right - that the underlying problem is a tension between the Welt and the pure desire to know - then the solution is dialectical. Dialectic is concerned with three factors. First, it is concerned with the concrete: in the present case, with the concrete subject and his Sorge. Secondly, dialectic is concerned with the contradictory: the contradiction is not in propositions but in the subject, for the subject as intelligent and rational consciousness is not identical with the subject of Sorge, hence what is real in the Welt is not real in the universe of being, and vice versa. Thirdly, dialectic is concerned with change: the contradiction involves a tension, a tension in the concrete, and so heads for change.