Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas

Titel: Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas

Stichwort: Unvollständigkeit der arstotelischen Metaphysik

Kurzinhalt: Identität im Verstehen, der Akt des Dinges als esse naturale, aber dieses esse ist nicht identisch mit dem Wissen selbst (außer bei Gott)

Textausschnitt: Again, the wise man knows the difference between appearance and reality. He is ready to refute the sophistries that would confound the two, but he is not prepared to discuss how our immanent activities also contain a transcendence. Aristotelian gnoseology is brilliant but it is not complete:e knowledge is by identity; the act of the thing as sensible is the act of sensation; the act of the thing as intelligible is the act of understanding; but the act of die thing as real is the esse naturale of the thing and, except in divine self-knowledge, that esse is not identical with knowing it.
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But the problem of knowledge, once it is granted that knowledge is by identity, is knowledge of the other. As long as faculty and object are in potency to knowing and being known, there is as yet no knowledge. Inasmuch as faculty and object are in act identically, there is knowledge indeed as perfection but not yet knowledge of the other. Reflection is required, first, to combine sensible data with intellectual insight in the expression of a quod quid est, of an essence that prescinds from its being known, and then, on a deeper level, to affirm the existence of that essence. Only by reflection on the identity of act can one arrive at the difference of potency. And since reflection is not an identity, the Aristotelian theory of knowledge by identity is incomplete.