Autor: Melchin, R. Kenneth

Buch: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Titel: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Stichwort: Individual Bias (Befangenheit): Ablehnung der intelligenten Integration, Verweigerung der Frage, Rückwirkung auf die Spontaneität (neurale Mannigfaltige); Egoismus

Kurzinhalt: ... the failure to integrate properly the demands of the neural and intersubjective exigence with the anticipations of a question, in a scheme of acts involving understanding, judgment or decision.

Textausschnitt: 7.2 Individual Bias

14/7 Lonergan calls individual bias the distortion in the development of an individual's intelligence and the consequently ensuing distortion in his or her whole affective and experiential orientation which results from the refusal to choose the good of order over the individual's egoistically centered desires and fears.1 Such egoism is not to be confused with the individual's desire for his or her own development in virtue, in wisdom and in ultimate happiness.2 Rather, egoism is the exclusion of the immanent drive of intelligence to participate, dialectically, with the drive towards spontaneous, intersubjective unification in the pursuit of the common good.3 It is the refusal to raise and to meet the further questions that arise in the design and execution of one's own projects. And such a refusal constitutes a circumscription of one's own horizons of concern and a limitation that one sets on the range of concerns to which one will open oneself. The intelligence is given free play within the boundaries set by personal desire. But beyond these confines practical intelligence is simply ruled out.4 (214; Fs) (notabene)

15/7 The quest for the good of order was conceived as the dialectically structured drive towards the unification of two principles, the operative principle of intelligence and the principle of mutuality.5 Consequently individual bias will manifest itself as contradicting both principles. As a deformation of intelligence, individual bias contradicts the drive of intelligence to raise and answer the relevant further questions. And as a violation of the demands of intersubjectivity, the individual bias suppresses the spontaneous concern for approval of and approval by others. In addition, since the spontaneous drive of intelligence actually involves its own dialectic operating between an exigence in the neural manifold and a drive to order that manifold, the bias will also constitute a distortion in the experiential orientation of the whole subject. Thus, when Lonergan calls individual bias or egoism 'an interference of spontaneity with the development of intelligence,' his presentation here is somewhat misleading.6 It might seem, from this presentation, that knowing seeks an autonomy from the distorting influences of the other human passions, appetites, feelings and drives. And so in this view the individual bias would be another instance of the intrusion of 'affectivity' into the proper exercise and development of autonomous rationality. But this view stands in contradiction to the thrust of my interpretation of Lonergan's account of the dialectical interaction of intelligence with experiential exigence, on the one hand, and with the principal of mutuality in the dialectic of community, on the other.7 (214f; Fs)

16/7 What intelligence seeks to achieve is not a flight from experiential spontaneity or affectivity, rather, an integration of such affectivity. The neural manifold changes with changes in the subject's environment. And operations in 'the basic pattern of experience' seem to order the neural manifold in accordance with a set of anticipations immanent in the question and in subjective spontaneity on the one hand, and with an intelligibility immanent in the environment manifesting itself as an exigence in the neural manifold, on the other. Thus the drive of intelligence involves the tension between two principles seeking resolution in the adequacy of an appropriate integration of a human person, in the context of a flexibly recurring scheme of acts. The individual bias, then, is not so much an intrusion of the biological or aesthetic, affective or intersubjective spontaneities into the proper development of intelligence, but the failure to integrate properly the demands of the neural and intersubjective exigence with the anticipations of a question, in a scheme of acts involving understanding, judgment or decision. The individual bias is, ultimately, an intelligent, responsible act that does violence to the demands of personal and intersubjective experience. And it does so by failing to carry out its own mandate. (215; Fs)
(notabene)

17/7 If carried on long enough the refusal to raise and to answer the appropriate questions will result in distortions not only in the horizon within which intelligence operates but also in the experiential and intersubjective routines of the whole person. These experiential routines are the basis for the subject's practical interrelations with his or her environment. And so as they become more and more distorted the probabilities for adequate integration become lower and lower. Distorted experience becomes the foundation for distorted understanding and praxis and the bias sets the subject on an accelerating course of decline. (215; Fs) (notabene)

18/7 However, while individual bias is operative in society, the recurrent deformations that follow from operative 'social structures' can in no way be attributed to the individual bias. For while individual bias occurs extremely frequently there are not recurrent patterns or trends associated with stable f-probabilities in identifiable classes of individual bias. And when such recurrent patterns and classes arise then the bias is no longer to be explained in terms of the refusal of the 'good or order' but in terms of deformations in the operative notions of what would constitute such order and in how it is to be achieved. In his account of the dissolution of the possessive market structure in the nineteenth century, Macpherson notes that the development of class consciousness, political articulation, and a vision of alternate social and economic relations among the working class resulted in their becoming aware that the existing 'order' was neither necessary nor in the service of their interests. Thus was lost their sense of equal participation in the marketplace. (215; Fs)

19/7 Furthermore with the universal franchise and the perpetuation of consciously operative class division, the general sense of cohesion, necessary for the functioning of the possessive market structure, was also lost.8 This account illustrates well the fact that operative orders need to be known as in fact 'good.' Bias can be operative recurrently in classes to marshall power in the service of group interests which do not serve the wider common good. But as long as such is known to be the case (and evidence is never long in arising) the fact of order ceases to be the 'good or order.' Lonergan's account of the group bias shows that structural parallels exist between the individual bias and the group bias. But the difference lies in the fact of system operative in the genesis and maintenance of f-probably recurrent classes of deformations in notions of what constitutes the 'good of order.' And while power is an accelerator, power is not the central issue in this account. (215f; Fs)