Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Topics in Education

Titel: Topics in Education

Stichwort: Differentiale des Guten: intellektuelle Entwicklung 2; Zivilisation, Kultur: die reflektive Entwicklung; Fortschritt in Kultur durch Verschiedenheit der Kompaktheit

Kurzinhalt: The accumulation of insights results in a new civilizational order. But the structural invariants do not change; Mircea Eliade (Jung), Voegelin;

Textausschnitt: 12/3 Now, besides this first level of intellectual development, which is a development in intelligence, in the question Quid sit? What is it? there is also a reflective level of development, a development of culture as opposed to civilization. Civilization is connected with technology, economy, and the polity or state.
()
The accumulation of insights results in a new civilizational order. But the structural invariants do not change. They are not the object of a new discovery. They are always there, operative though they are not noticed. You can stop the man on the street and ask him what he thinks of the distinctions among particular goods, the good of order, and values, and he will simply gape at you. Still, the structural invariants are operative in his life, in his ways of thinking and doing things, even though he does not advert to them explicitly. They are implicit in all human acts -in experience, understanding, reflection, freedom and responsibility. They are given some expression in the customs, the laws, the stories, the traditional wisdom of every society. (55; Fs)
()
13/3 Nonetheless, there is a progress in the apprehension of the structural invariants. That progress is from the compactness of the symbol to the differentiation of philosophic, scientific, theological, and historical consciousness. (55; Fs) (notabene)
()
17/3 A similar sort of work on a different level is being done by Eric Voegelin in Order and History. Voegelin's study reveals how the symbols of Babylonian and Egyptian thought were countered in the revelation given to Israel, and how the symbols of the Homeric age were transformed, upset, transcended by such philosophers as Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Xenophanes, and by the movement into explicitly rational consciousness that appears with the Sophists and particularly with Plato and Aristotle. Voegelin understands cultural development in terms of the movement away from the compactness of the symbol to differentiated consciousness. (57; Fs) (notabene)
()
21/3 Our first differential, then, is intellectual development. Man grows in understanding of nature and himself, and there is a consequent development in civilizational order. Intellectual development explains the conspicuous difference between the Stone Age and successive periods of human life and history. But at the same time, arising in and because of this change in civilizational order, there is an enucleation, a development, in the apprehension and the realization of the structural invariants of the human good itself. (58; Fs) (notabene)