Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Understanding and Being

Titel: Understanding and Being

Stichwort: Objektivität und Isomorphismus; Grundfrage: Intelligibilität des Seins

Kurzinhalt: fundamental decision: Is or is not being intelligible? If it is not; Sorge - oder: this tiny little thread of the pure desire to know that is found in us at times; Beispiel: Fleischeternal light

Textausschnitt: I'm putting the cart before the horsec for people who know by taking a look!
There is a fundamental decision; you can't have it both ways. With regard to the precise issue: Is or is not being intelligible? If it is not, there is no reason for supposing that you could know it by understanding or by judgment, and, if it is something you can't know at all, then it is outside the field of possible questions or suspicions. It is nothing. Insofar as being is what is to be known by intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation, then being is intelligible, because the intelligible is just what is grasped.
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The 'real world' for people with that difficulty is what corresponds to one's Sorge, one's concern, and one's concern is not exclusively a matter of the pure desire to know. One's concern includes all of one's sensitivity, all of one's intersubjectivity, all of one's affectivity, and so on and so forth. It involves the whole man, not this tiny little thread of the pure desire to know that is found in us at times - when you do an awful lot of arguing and proving, then it's there. And that is what the real world corresponds to, and that real world is had by us in a more elevated fashion.
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These things become clearer by taking a step further and going into the metaphysics. Why is it that our minds are capable, by understanding and judgment, of knowing what really is? It is because they are created participations of the uncreated light. St Augustine held that we knew truth not by looking outside us, but within, and not properly looking within but in a changeless light, an incommutable light, contemplating the eternal reasons. And St Thomas takes up this doctrine, which was current among Augustinians in the Middle Ages, and he says, 'Do we look at the eternal reasons? Do we judge things by the eternal reasons?' ... And, St Thomas says, we judge things by the eternal reasons not in the sense that we take a look at the eternal reasons, but in the sense that the very light of our intelligence is a created participation of the uncreated light that is God himself. Just as the uncreated light that is God himself is the ground of all possibility and actuality - it is a real omnipotence - so this created participation of the eternal light, that is our intelligence, that comes to light in intelligent and rational consciousness, is an intentional omnipotence, a capacity to ask questions about everything and, by understanding and forming concepts and making judgments, to know them.