Autor: Melchin, R. Kenneth

Buch: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Titel: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Stichwort: Geschichte als Meinung; Antwort auf den 1. Einwand; Dialektik, Befangenheit (bias); innere Bedingungen und das dramatische Subjekt; das neurale Mannigfaltige - Streben nach Integration

Kurzinhalt: ... that 'internal' psychic and emotional forces and processes operative at a subliminal level, function to condition, massively, intelligent and responsible activity, to the extent that much, if not all, of human freedom ... is an illusion.

Textausschnitt: 6.4.1 'Internal' Conditions and the Dramatic Subject: Dialectic and Dramatic Bias

38/6 The claim of the first objection is that 'internal' psychic and emotional forces and processes operative at a subliminal level, function to condition, massively, intelligent and responsible activity, to the extent that much, if not all, of human freedom (understood here in terms of intelligent self-determination) is an illusion. To respond to this objection requires introducing Lonergan's notion of 'dialectic.' (178; Fs) (notabene)

For the sake of greater precision, let us say that a dialectic is a concrete unfolding of linked but opposed principles of change. Thus, there will be a dialectic, if:

(1) there is an aggregate of events of a determinate character,
(2) the events may be traced to either or both of two principles,
(3) the principles are opposed yet bound together, and
(4) they are modified by the changes that successively result from them.1

39/6 In the dramatic pattern of common sense intelligence, Lonergan notes that there is operative a dialectical interaction between the spontaneous demands of neural patterns and processes, and the selection, integration and repression of such neural demand functions by the psyche through the conscious operations in the 'basic pattern of experience.' In such operations as seeing, hearing, wondering, understanding, an order or pattern is constituted in a manifold of neural events and processes. But such an order is not from nothing, for neural processes constitute an exigence for a certain range of ordering that leads to a correspondence between, for example, certain patterns of change in the optic nerve and certain acts of seeing.2 Since acts of psychic integration which meet an exigence of the neural manifold never occur in accordance with hard and fast laws, there will generally occur acts in the basic pattern which miss their mark. (179; Fs)

40/6 Furthermore, Lonergan goes on to note that intelligent acts operate in terms of anticipatory structures, practical projects, and social relations of role, identity and status. Thus questions are not only met with incorrect answers, they often invite and encourage incorrect answers when the subject's projects and anticipations do not correspond to the demands of experience. Subjects do not only stop short of correct answers, they also reject correct insights in favour of incorrect ones, in the interests of other ranges of concerns. But because the complete neural manifold presents an exigence for an appropriate integration, intelligence will be driven back to the data, back to further questions as long as satisfactory answers are not found and settled upon.3 (179; Fs)

41/6 The two principles of change, the drive to psychic integration and the exigence of the neural manifold for appropriate integration, operate not only in harmony but also in opposition. Lonergan suggests that much fearful avoidance of questions and concerns, an unhappy subterranean life of questions, experiences and images, and some inhibited performance of psychically disturbed subjects has been explained in terms of the reordering of the neural and psychic manifolds around the repression of the 'dramatic bias.'4 In the measure that repressed questions, experiences, and images arise in wider or narrower dimensions of life, the demand of the neural processes for appropriate integration will continue to drive more or less relentlessly towards surfacing in other areas of conscious life. Thus they operate more or less powerfully as a force or principle that warps the rest of the subject's life of experiences, insights, judgments and decisions.5 (179; Fs) (notabene)

42/6 But the dialectical interaction between the ordering principle of psychic acts and the exigences of neural processes for appropriate order does not only manifest itself in dramatic bias and, at the extreme, psychic aberration.6 For this dialectic drives the subject towards further questions, and further experience when insights fail to satisfy the demands of a question, towards images, music and art when the operative values of a culture cease to nourish, and towards getting in touch with the subject's own feelings when projects, routines, and relations of life become mechanical and unreal. But as life is constituted as much by failure as success the resultant aberrations of dramatic bias will manifest themselves as a principle of social and historical decline, which stands in opposition to the historical operation of the drive of universal finality.7 Lonergan explains the historical principle of 'individual bias' in terms of this dialectic. The historical manifestation of this principle of bias will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter.8 (179f; Fs) (notabene)

43/6 In response to this first objection, then, Lonergan would argue that there certainly remain neural and affective events which constitute the conditions for cognitional and responsible operations and which function in patterns or schemes that distort and limit the effective range of these operations.9 But such events and schemes of events do not order decisively and determine the cognitional and responsible acts. Rather, the neural and affective events and processes constitute a manifold to be ordered by such psychic operations. Because the ordering process involves the operation of two related but opposed principles of change the process will proceed dialectically as a linked set of changes in the intellect and in the neural manifold, such that each change conditions the occurence of the next. Each psychic integration of the neural manifold operates cumulatively on the materials presented by the previous acts and the combined effects of the linkage and opposition between the two principles both keeps the dialectical scheme operating circularly and keeps the subject either developing or, in the case of prolonged bias, declining until the repression either forces a reversal or destroys the subject. The cumulatively operating acts of integration recur in accordance with statistical laws. And in Lonergan's explanation it is the element of randomness, or absence of reason, at the centre of the statistical laws, which precludes a reductionist explanation and which accounts for the flexibility that dynamizes the operation of the dialectic.10 (180; Fs) (notabene)

44/6 While precluding a reductionist account of acts of meaning, this notion of dialectic put forward by Lonergan makes room for an explanation of human action in terms of the operation of psychic aberration and opens the way for an account of historical events and processes in terms of bias. The difference between the operation of bias and the developing orientation of the dialectic is to be understood in terms of a difference in the f-probable frequency of occurrence of competently performed, cumulatively integrating acts of intelligence and responsibility. Shifts in such probabilities in the lives of individual subjects and in the recurring activities of societies and cultures could be explained in terms of changes in conditions associated with experiences and life routines. And a psychological study of the myriad of ways in which bias manifests itself could well prove a powerful explanatory tool in the hands of the historian. But such shifts in probability, Lonergan would argue, constitute expansions or contractions in the range of effective freedom. Far from precluding essential freedom such shifts in probability demand the notion of essential freedom and its dynamic structure as an emergent integration of a lower order manifold.11 (180f; Fs) (notabene)