Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Understanding and Being

Titel: Understanding and Being

Stichwort: Zwei Klassen von Einsicht: zentrale - konjugate Form; Substanz - Akzidenz; Hierarchie der konjugaten Formen

Kurzinhalt: Central and Conjugate Forms; When data are considered as particular, and a multiplicity of data are referred to a single unity, you have a grasp of form of one type, which we may call central or substantial form.

Textausschnitt: 1.3 Central and Conjugate Forms

11/9 Let us return to the relation between what is grasped by insight and what is presented in data, and examine it in further detail. Forms, insights, divide into two fundamental classes that are quite distinct. When data are considered as particular, and a multiplicity of data are referred to a single unity, you have a grasp of form of one type, which we may call central or substantial form. We have insights into data as particular. It is in considering these data that I have insight into the unity of this man. Consequently, there is a central form in beings, a central form which corresponds to what is grasped when you say it is one and the same over a spatiotemporal volume of particular data. (204; Fs)

12/9 But when you compare data with one another, build up classifications by similarity, and proceed to work out the relations of things to one another, you arrive at scientific laws. Those laws involve relations, determinate relations of things to one another. A law is an expression of an intelligibility; it involves something corresponding to form. This gives us a second type of form, conjugate or accidental form. There is a determinateness in potency and act that comes from the form. Judgment only says 'Yes.' The form corresponds to data, but it is the ground of the intelligibility grasped in the data. If there are different types of form, there must be different types of potency and different types of act. (204; Fs)

13/9 Again, we have spoken of higher viewpoints. For a while, intelligence works along with data, under the guidance of certain insights and formulations. When it comes up against difficulties, intelligence starts all over again, reformulating all of its fundamental conceptions. That is the result of further insights that constitute a higher viewpoint with respect to the previous set of insights. In the first instance, higher viewpoints regard the development of human intelligence. But higher viewpoints also have a relevance to the hierarchy in things. (The notion of a hierarchy in things involves a very complex argument that I had best not attempt to summarize.1) For the forms on any given level, there is a set of laws. From that set of laws a certain number of schemes of recurrence can be developed. The schemes of recurrence can be brought to light by a physicist, a chemist, and so on. The regular events that occur on that level may be entirely explained by the laws and schemes on that level; but it may also happen that they are not. (204; Fs)

14/9 In the biological unit of the cell, there is taking place a continuous release of chemical actions, and every one of those actions occurs in accordance with the laws of chemistry. But if it is not possible through chemical laws and the schemes of recurrence that can be devised in chemistry to account for the regularity with which those chemical processes take place in the cell, you have to appeal to a higher viewpoint to account for the regularity, and you introduce conjugate forms on the biological level with their laws and schemes. If in the animal you find regularities that cannot be accounted for by the totality of laws and schemes of recurrence on the biological level, you postulate another higher level. You have grounds for another higher viewpoint, in which are introduced the conjugates of the sensitive level. If you find, with regard to men, that all of the laws and schemes of sensitive psychology, which pertain to the psychic level, do not account for the intelligible talk that men carry on, you have to go on to a still higher level and posit intellectual forms that account for human behavior. (205; Fs)

15/9 The idea of a higher viewpoint, while it was first developed in terms of the development of human intelligence, also provides us with an analogy for the hierarchy of conjugate forms, accidental forms, that are found in single beings. The conjugate acts of a lower level, insofar as they occur regularly and are accounted for by the laws and schemes of recurrence of the lower level, pertain simply to that lower level. If, on the other hand, there is a regularity in the conjugate acts of a lower level that is not accounted for by that level, then there is an information of that lower level by conjugate forms of a higher level. (205; Fs)

16/9 For example, take the flow of images in an animal (insofar as the animal has a flow of images): you do not need to postulate intelligence to account for it. However, the flow of images in a man, with all of the subsequent psychology resulting from the images and ending up in talk, is not accounted for without introducing higher integrations. We can all witness and experience the process of learning, and discover that to be able to talk intelligently, properly, on a matter, one has to have a prior development of understanding. Teaching is principally an encouragement, a help, in that development of understanding. Consequently, Aristotle says2 that to teach, the fundamental requirement is that you understand. If you do not understand, you are not going to help anyone else to understand. Now it is insofar as there is a higher integration of images and the motor activities involved in speech on the level of intelligence that you have the recurrence of intelligible content in speech, and the domination of speech by an intellectual intention. The relation of insight to data is, in its proper meaning, a case in which a higher conjugate form is controlling an otherwise coincidental multiplicity of conjugate acts on a lower level. When this analogy is pushed to the lowest level, we have, on the side of the accidents, the multiplicity3 - the empirical residue involved in space-time; and on the substantial, central side, we have prime matter. (205f; Fs)