Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas

Titel: Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas

Stichwort: Erkenntnis d. Seele, Intellekt: in genere intelligibilium

Kurzinhalt: human intellect: in genere intelligibilium just a potency; Sehen: nicht seiner selbst bewusst, darum schon untauglich für die Erklärung des Intellekts

Textausschnitt: Knowledge of soul, then, begins from a distinction of objects; specifying objects leads to a discrimination between different kinds of act; different kinds of act reveal difference of potency; and the different combinations of potencies lead to knowledge of the different essences that satisfy the generic definition of soul.
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Thus the human soul does not know itself by a direct grasp of its own essence; that is the prerogative of God and of the angels. ... The fact is that human intellect is in genere intelligibilium just a potency; unless its potency is reduced to act, it neither understands nor is understood. On the other hand, the acquisition of an understanding of anything, of any habitual scientific knowledge, makes our intellect habitually capable not only of understanding the scientific object in question but also of understanding itself. ... It was by scrutinizing both the object understood and the understanding intellect that Aristotle investigated the nature of possible intellect. And, indeed, we can have no knowledge of our intellects except by reflecting on our own acts of understanding. Evidently, the Aristotelian and Thomist program is not a matter of considering ocular vision and then conceiving an analogous spiritual vision that is attributed to a spiritual faculty named intellect. On the contrary, it is a process of introspection that discovers the act of insight into phantasm and the definition as an expression of the insight, that
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... there is to be found in the independent Thomist writings not a few additional points of introspective psychology. Of these the most fundamental is the distinction between what we should call an empirical awareness of our inner acts and a scientific grasp of their nature. The scientific grasp is in terms of objects, acts, potencies, essence of soul.