Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: Von der klassischen Kultur zum geschichtlichen Denken

Kurzinhalt: The New Cultural Context, Liste u. Gegenüberstellung: klassische Positionen, historisches Denken; 4 Bedeutungen von Geschichte, Grenzen des common sense

Textausschnitt: () Lonergan strongly believed that the renewal and reform of Catholicism confronted the Church with a truly momentous task. Catholic philosophy and theology had been heavily dependent on the presuppositions of classical culture.
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The heuristic emphasis of classicism is on permanent theoretical achievement, the fixity and certainty of truth, the universality of cultural norms and social institutions. By contrast, the genuinely historical mentality emphasizes the self-correcting process of inquiry, the development and revision of provisional hypotheses and theories, the concrete pluralism of cultural practices and commitments. Where the classicist anticipates finality of outcomes and judgments, his historically minded counterpart actively engages in the unrestricted quest for deeper theoretical and practical understanding.
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The primary sources of classical culture were poetry, politics, rhetoric, philosophy and religion. At the intellectual heart of modernity were the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and the revolution in historical mindedness that emerged from the Romantic movement. Taken together, these two modern revolutions transformed our understanding of nature and history.
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Classicist science was the permanent achievement of syllogistically organized demonstrative knowledge. For the historically minded theorist of knowledge, science is the dynamic, self-correcting, normative process of empirical inquiry conducted within the specialized disciplines of the global scientific community.
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Classicist philosophy was based on logic and metaphysics. It sought its foundational principles in axiomatic truths or invariant intelligible forms. Historically minded philosophy, by contrast, has turned its attention to the human subject, to the subject's unrestricted desire for knowing the real and doing the good, to the unfolding of those desires on the four levels of intentional consciousness, ... Lonergan devised a new architectonic strategy for philosophy, basing epistemology, metaphysics and ethics, on the personal appropriation of cognitional and moral activity. His bold reconception of philosophy's internal structure, his insistence on the importance of intentional analysis, and his privileging of cognitional theory were deliberately designed to address the dynamic transformation of empirical science and the exigences of historical mindedness.
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The various methods of empirical inquiry, scientific, philosophical, practical, theological and scholarly are extensions and adaptations of a single, invariant, normative pattern. In discovering and articulating the generalized empirical method that underlies human cognition and action, Lonergan penetrated to the deepest sources of modern culture and achieved a critical standpoint from which to appraise and connect them.
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The shift from classicist to historical consciousness has also engendered a new philosophical anthropology.
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The new philosophical anthropology, by contrast, starts with individual human beings in the concrete circumstances of their actual lives.
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It is useful to distinguish four different senses of 'history' as Lonergan uses that clearly analogous term.
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The obligations entailed by this new awareness of historical responsibility reveal a significant limitation in common sense practicality. Despite its evident merits, common sense reasoning is unable to think and choose on the level of systematic and historical consciousness. It is characteristically subject to a general bias that tends to dismiss the insights of theoretical reflection and historical research as unnecessary, impractical and unrealistic.