Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Understanding and Being

Titel: Understanding and Being

Stichwort: Isomorphismus; Intelligens als Teilnahme (Partizipation) am ungeschaffenen Licht, Augustin, Thomas

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: 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.
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Let us try, therefore, to distinguish the different stages in this isomorphism. We have three levels in our cognitional process, an experiential, an intellectual, and a rational. And to take the simplest type of example, we will suppose that there does exist a perfect circle, and on the experiential level we see it, ...
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Now we have three acts, or three levels of activity, and they presuppose one another -just as cooking the meat presupposes buying it, and eating it presupposes cooking it. These three levels are mutually related, and complementary
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Now those three components are distinct as notions, they are notionally distinct. With regard to the three components as contents in my mind, you can say that P is not Q and P is not R and Q is not R, where P, Q, and R are these three, and you consider them as notions - there is a notional distinction, as contents in the mind. And the proof is that what is grasped here, what is grasped by insight, is intelligible in itself; the data are not intelligible in themselves, they are merely given, they are intelligible in the other. One and the same cannot have contradictory predicates. A cannot be both B and not-B. You cannot say the content 'data' and the content 'intelligible necessity' are really just one content with two predicates, two aspects, because the aspects are contradictory: one is intelligible in itself, the other is not, and intelligibility is a relevant predicate to these contents.