Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Understanding and Being

Titel: Understanding and Being

Stichwort: Intelligibilität der Form und des Aktes; Unintelligibilität des Aktes; Frage nach Gott

Kurzinhalt: Form is intelligible in itself. Potency has an intelligibility, not in itself, but from its form. Act is not intelligible in itself

Textausschnitt: Form is intelligible in itself. It's what you know by insight, by understanding. It's as much of the thing as you know insofar as you're understanding it. And that is a pure intelligibility. But potency, the empirical residue, is not intelligible in itself. It's intelligible in form. The empirical residue as such is a limit to the intelligibility we find in data. But insofar as one fully grasps the nature of form, I believe one finds a certain intelligibility in the empirical residue, in potency. Potency has an intelligibility, not in itself, but from its form.
()
Again, act - existence, or event - is not intelligible in itself. It's contingent. You know existence or event through judgment, through the proper content of judgment. That proper content results from a grasp of the virtually unconditioned. The virtually unconditioned is a conditioned whose conditions happen to be fulfilled. Because the conditions merely happen to be fulfilled, the act is contingent. There is a defect of intelligibility in act. Act is not intelligible in itself. The existents in this world of our experience have not an intelligibility in themselves - we postulate a cause for them. If the universe were completely intelligible in itself, it would be impossible to argue from the universe to the existence of God, because you'd have no reason to go beyond the universe to attain complete intelligibility.
()
If the universe were in itself completely intelligible, then intelligence would have no lever, no fulcrum, by which it could go beyond the universe. There has to be a defect in the intelligibility of this universe to have arguments that will take us beyond the universe, to complete the intelligibility.
()
And that's quite clear from any of the arguments that are employed. In any of the arguments from causality you argue from the contingency. Or, you argue from the order of the universe not being accountable for by the universe; in other words, it's there as a fact, but if you have an intelligible order, the existence of that intelligible order is not accounted for without an intelligence. And so on. You are always arguing from some defect in the intelligibility of this universe.