Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Topics in Education

Titel: Topics in Education

Stichwort: Philosophie der Aufklärung als absolute Norm > Philosophie der Erziehung; Descartes, Newton, Husserl

Kurzinhalt: Drei Stufen in Philosophie: Unterschied zwischen Theologie und Philosophie, Philosophie und Wissenschaft; Philosophie als Nachfolgerin von Religion

Textausschnitt: 17/1 At the beginning of his posthumously published work Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften and die transzendentale Phänomenologie,1 Edmund Husserl made a point that I think will be helpful to us. He urged that 'Western man'2 can be conceived simply as an anthropological classification, a technical term in anthropology, a geographic designation of a civilization; or, on the other hand, it can be conceived as the Renaissance conceived man. The Greeks of fourth-century Athens took current words in their culture - epistêmê, sophia, alêtheia - and gave them a meaning, imposed upon them an Umdeutung; a shift of meaning, with the result that the words came to signify something of which the average Athenian had no notion whatsoever. The Renaissance discovery of the ancients retrieved an idea of man that involved the negation of merely traditional power and merely traditional norms, and the affirmation of human reason and human freedom as the ultimate principles in individual life and in human society. According to Husserl, the ideal of man as endowed with reason and freedom, and as destined to base his life and the life of human society upon reason and freedom - upon reason as opposed to merely traditional norms, and upon freedom as opposed to merely traditional power - was the ideal that captured the Renaissance. (10f; Fs)

18/1 The implement and carrier of that ideal was philosophy. But since the Middle Ages philosophy has been understood in any of three quite different manners, and, I submit, none of them is satisfactory for our purposes.3 (11; Fs)

First, there was philosophy as it functioned in the context of the medieval symbiosis of theology, philosophy, the liberal arts, and the sciences.4 (11; Fs)

Second, there was philosophy as a distinct discipline and department, completely autonomous, recognizing the right and the truth of a revealed religion, but still proceeding exclusively in the light of its own criteria and its own methods. From about the year 1230,5 the distinction between philosophy and theology was clearly drawn, but the separation of philosophy and theology emerges in full clarity in the work of Descartes. What is not clear in Descartes, of course, is the distinction between philosophy and science. He proves the conservation of momentum, for example, from the immutability of God. And while there is effectively the distinction between philosophy and science in Newton, there is not yet the verbal distinction. Newton named his great work Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica - The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. He thought he was doing philosophy in presenting his theory of universal gravitation. (11; Fs) (notabene)

19/1 So first, you can conceive philosophy in the sense of the medieval living together with theology, and secondly you can conceive philosophy as a totally distinct and independent department that appeals to reason and acknowledges the existence of revealed truth, but that itself is something different and separate. A third conception of philosophy regards philosophy as the successor to religion, as the supreme arbiter in all things. The philosophy of the philosophes, the thinkers of the Enlightenment,6 was philosophy in this third sense, philosophy as an affirmation of human reason and human freedom as the ultimate basis of human life. It emphasized in particular the negation of merely traditional norms and merely traditional power, the negation that in the French Revolution dispossessed the king, the feudal nobility, and the church. The fertility of this idea, ramifying into countless fields of thought and activity, steadily promoted individualism, democracy, and state-controlled secularist education. It did so both directly and indirectly, though of course with varying degrees of consistency and efficacy. Philosophy, not merely in the sense of something distinct and separate from theology, but as the ultimate norm, an absolute self-affirmation by man, has been the inspiration of philosophies of education, as of the whole modern movement. (11f; Fs) (notabene)