Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas

Titel: Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas

Stichwort: Composition or Division: Zusammenfassung

Kurzinhalt: Fifthly, reasoning in its essence is simply the development of insight; it is motion towards understanding. In the concrete such development is a dialectical interplay of sense, memory, imagination, insight, definition, critical reflection, judgment ...

Textausschnitt: Next, many insights into many phantasms express themselves severally in many definitions; none of these singly is true or false; nor are all together true or false, for as yet they are not together. Thirdly, what brings definitions together is not some change in the definitions; it is a change in the insights whence they proceed. Insights coalesce and develop; they grow into apprehensions of intelligibility on a deeper level and with a wider sweep; and these pro-founder insights are expressed, at times indeed by the invention of such baffling abstractions as classicism or romanticism, education, evolution, or the philosophia perennis, but more commonly and more satisfactorily by the combination, as combination, of simple concepts. Fourthly, such synthetic sweep and penetration comes at first blush to the angel, but man has to reason to it; his intellect is discursive. Still, it is not pure discourse. Without initial and natural acts of understanding, reasoning would never begin; nor would there be profit or term to reasoning, did it not naturally end in an act of understanding in which the multiple elements of the reasoning process come into focus in a single view. Fifthly, reasoning in its essence is simply the development of insight; it is motion towards understanding. In the concrete such development is a dialectical interplay of sense, memory, imagination, insight, definition, critical reflection, judgment; we bring to bear on the issue all the resources at our command. Still, the more intelligent we are, the more we are capable of knowing ex pede Herculem; then the more rapid is our progress to the goal of understanding, and the less is our appeal to the stylized reasoning of textbooks on formal logic. Again, once we understand, we no longer bother to reason; we take in the whole at a glance. With remarkable penetration Aquinas refused to take as reason the formal affair that modern logicians invent machines to perform. He defined reason as development in understanding; and to that, formal reasoning is but an aid.