Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Second Collection

Titel: A Second Collection

Stichwort: K. Rahner; Naturgesetz - transzendentale Methode; (verum et falsum sunt in mente, bonum et malum sunt in rebus

Kurzinhalt: Karl Rahner observed that natural law should be approached through a transcendental method

Textausschnitt: 6a In the article on Naturrecht in the Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche (7: 827) Father Karl Rahner observed that natural law should be approached through a transcendental method. (Fs)

6b Any serious elaboration of this remark would take us too far afield, but three assertions may perhaps be permitted. (Fs)

First, just as the abstract apprehension of man provides itself with abstract ontological and ethical foundations in primitive propositions from which its doctrines, criteria, norms, etc., are deduced or somehow proved, so the more concrete and historical apprehension of man provides itself with its appropriately concrete foundations in structural features of the conscious, operating subject, by a method that has come to be named transcendental. (Fs)

Secondly, the stock objections that historical-mindedness involves one in relativism and situation ethics are to be met by adverting to the distinction just drawn. One cannot ground a concrete historical apprehension of man on abstract foundations: but this does not establish the inadequacy of the quite different foundations provided by a transcendental method. (Fs)

Thirdly, what moves men is the good, and good in the concrete (verum et falsum sunt in mente, bonum et malum sunt in rebus; bonum ex integra causa, malum ex quocumque defectu). If at one time law was in the forefront of human development, as one might infer from the language of the Deuteronomist, from the fervent praise of law in the Psalms, from the role of law in the history of the clarification of such concepts as justice, responsibility, guilt; still, at the present time it would seem that the immediate carrier of human aspiration is the more concrete apprehension of the human good effected through such theories of history as the liberal doctrine of progress, the Marxist doctrine of dialectical materialism and, most recently, Teilhard de Chardin’s identi­fication of cosmogenesis, anthropogenesis, and christogenesis. (Fs)