Autor: Melchin, R. Kenneth

Buch: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Titel: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Stichwort: Ethik und Geschichte 2; Lonergan: Verhältnis von Natur und Vernunft (im Gs. zu Kant); decline; Freiheit als Integration, Kriterium für Freiheit

Kurzinhalt: ... human freedom is not conceived as randomness or the absence of restrictions but as the capacity for some intelligent self-regulation ...

Textausschnitt: 75/6 Writing almost two hundred years later, Bernard Lonergan works through these same sets of questions in his study of understanding, Insight. But while the philosophers of Enlightenment Europe were championing the radical discontinuities between the human exercise of intelligence and what was then conceived to be the 'lawful' operation of the so-called 'natural' processes of the material and social orders, Lonergan was writing in the wake of a massive scientific discovery of the continuites. Evolutionary theory since Darwin had come to think of man as evolving from the animal world and sharing many biological and social behaviour patterns with the higher animals. Psychological experimentation since Freud and Jung was uncovering vast regions of psychic life whose influence on the exercise of 'reason' was both overwhelming and undeniable. Historians, cultural anthropologists, sociologists and scholars in theology and world religions were discovering the massive import of historical, cultural, and indeed since Marx, economic contexts for the prevailing meanings, themes, questions, concerns, symbols, values and styles of reasoning of any given time and place. And quantum mechanics and the statistical methods in the social sciences were progressively undermining a rigidly determinist conception of the 'lawfully ordered' natural world, and were asking questions about the very meaning of the word 'law.'1 (191; Fs)

76/6 Consequently Lonergan's question about the relationship between individual morality and the course of natural and human history is formulated with a notion of 'ought' or 'good' that is not defined purely in terms of what is autonomous or discontinuous in human rationality and morality but in terms of an overall account of the dynamic structure of world processes, both 'natural' and human. The fact of continuity was, for the most part, taken for granted by Lonergan but it remained for him to develop his account of the structure of such world processes that left an open door for understanding the discontinuities: for randomness, for emergence, for freedom and thus for morality. How can the laws of physics and chemistry, the evolutionary structures of biological, zoological and human processes be understood so as to maintain the ground for generalization, for recurrence, for operative process, for continuity, while at the same time explaining the massive fact of contingency, of randomness, or newly emergent events, processes, and operators? This is the question which occupies the first five chapters of Insight and whose answers are integrated into Lonergan's theory of world process, emergent probability. (191f; Fs)

77/6 We have seen, above,2 how Lonergan understands human acts of cognition, the development of skills, and the integration of groups of such skills in ordered patterns conceived by intelligence, in terms of the structured heuristic, emergent probability. The notion of human freedom was defined in terms of this intelligent integration of skills. And thus the apparent contradiction between human freedom and the operation of laws was, at least in principle, overcome. Again, human freedom is not conceived as randomness or the absence of restrictions but as the capacity for some intelligent self-regulation. Thus human freedom, the foundation for the possibility of moral action and thus an ethics, need not necessarily imply an indeterminism or a relativism. The problem that remains, then, is to determine how Lonergan conceives the criterion for discriminating among possible courses of action conceived by intelligence, and for judging some superior to others. (192; Fs) (notabene)

78/6 Most simply Lonergan develops this criterion for judging moral 'good' in terms of the principles operative in his notions of historical progress and decline. (192; Fs) (notabene)
Just as the counter-positions of metaphysics invite their own reversal by their inconsistency with intelligent and reasonable affirmation, so the basically similar counter-positions of the ethical order through the shorter and longer cycles of the dialectic of progress and decline either enforce their own reversal or destroy their carriers. Just as the heuristic structure of our knowing couples with the generalized emergent probability of the proportionate universe, to reveal an upwardly directed dynamism of finality towards ever fuller being, so the obligatory structure of our rational self-consciousness
(1) finds its materials and its basis in the products of universal finality,
(2) is itself finality on the level of intelligent and rational consciousness, and
(3) is finality confronted with the alternative of choosing either development and progress or decline and extinction.3

79/6 Progress is the dynamic towards, and the structure of emergence and development as it is operative in human history. The essential elements recurring in all of Lonergan's discussions on progress are the notion of cumulation and the mediating operations of intelligence.4 The mediating operations of intelligence are what constitutes and characterize world process as distinctively human history.5 But it is the cumulative nature of development which constitutes the dynamic structure of progress. Consequently an analysis of the notions of progress and decline must begin with and focus upon the specific meaning of the terms emergence and development. The most complete treatment of these two terms is to be found in Insight, chapter fifteen, in the section on 'The Notion of Development.'6 Anyone who is familiar with the range of materials covered in this section will understand that only a brief introduction can be attempted here. (192; Fs) (notabene)
[...] a development may be defined as a flexible, linked sequence of dynamic and increasingly differentiated higher integrations that meet the tension of successively transformed underlying manifolds through successive applications of the principles of correspondence and emergence.7

80/6 Schemes emerge and function when their conditions are fulfilled. And their functioning effects a higher order integration of lower order manifolds. The foundation of the normative dynamism of development is this relationship between the higher order integration and the lower order manifold. For the integration marks the presence of emergent system, emergent intelligibility, in a manifold of events whose recurrence is otherwise coincidental or non-systematic. Such an emergence is not necessarily the emergence of a new recurrence scheme. Rather, the routine functioning of older schemes can have the effect of regularly ordering the materials of a lower manifold. And Lonergan provides a number of examples of such emergent integrations. (193; Fs)

First, there is the already familiar principle of emergence. Otherwise coincidental manifolds of lower conjugate acts invite the higher integration effected by higher conjugate forms. Thus, in our account of explanatory genera, chemical elements and compounds are higher integrations of otherwise coincidental manifolds of subatomic events; organisms are higher integrations of otherwise coincidental manifolds of chemical processes; sensitive consciousness is a higher integration of otherwise coincidental manifolds of changes in neural tissues; and accumulating insights are higher integrations of otherwise coincidental manifoldsof images or data.8