Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas

Titel: Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas

Stichwort: 3 Fragen hinsichtlich des phantasmas; Plato: kein intellectus agens?

Kurzinhalt: was wird erhellt; worin besteht die Erhellung / Immaterialisierung; wie kann das ein Objekt im intellectus possibilis hervorrufen?

Textausschnitt: How can the act existing in a material organ, such as the phantasm, be the agent object of immaterial intellect? Now Aquinas himself was concerned with this possibility. He pointed out that, since the objects of Platonist science were immaterial ideas, Platonist doctrine had no use for an agent intellect; on the other hand, since the objects of Aristotelian science were material things and only potentially intelligible, there had to be a power of the soul to illuminate phantasms, make them intelligible in act, make them objects in act, produce the immaterial in act, produce the universal, by way of abstracting species from individual matter or from material conditions. (182; Fs) (notabene)

317 Such statements raise three questions: what precisely is illuminated, immaterialized, universalized; in what does the illumination, immaterialization, universalization consist; and how can that provide an object in act for the possible intellect?
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More precisely, it is phantasm, not in the sense of act of the imagination, but in the sense of what is imagined, that is illuminated; for what is illuminated is what will be known; and certainly, insights into phantasm are not insights into the nature of acts of imagination but insights into the nature of what imagination presents; as Aquinas put it, insight into phantasm is like looking in, not looking at, a mirror.
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As to the second question, there is an interesting Thomist objection against a possible Averroist alternative that would account for our knowing by a separate possible intellect on the ground that species in the separate intellect irradiate our phantasms. The objection runs:
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The foregoing is negative. On the positive side there is a list of four requirements: the presence of agent intellect; the presence of phantasms; proper dispositions of the sensitive faculties; and, inasmuch as understanding one thing depends on understanding another, practice. The first two requirements recur in ...
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The imagined object as merely imagined and as present to a merely sensitive consciousness (subject) is not, properly speaking, intelligible in potency; but the same object present to a subject that is intelligent as well as sensitive may fairly be described as intelligible in potency. Thus, pure reverie, in which image succeeds image in the inner human cinema with never a care for the why or wherefore, illustrates the intelligible in potency.