Autor: Mehrere Autoren: Lonergan Workshop, Volume 4

Buch: Lonergan Workshop, Volume 4, Supplmentary Issue

Titel: On the "Meditative Origin of the Philosophical Knowledge of Order"

Stichwort: Lawrence über Voegelin: Luminosität - Staunen, potens omnia facere et fieri; geschaffene Teilnahme am ungeschaffenen Licht

Kurzinhalt: I am basically in agreement with these insights into luminosity ... But I would prefer not to dissociate luminosity from intentionality, but rather to specify it too in terms of wonder and questioning.

Textausschnitt: 61b
B. Luminosity: I would like to return now to the subject of the luminosity-structure of consciousness. On Voegelin's account, luminosity tends to function as a counterfoil to the limitations ascribed by him to the intentionality structure on the model of sense-perception. This procedure casts suggestive light on aspects of consciousness that cannot be accounted for from the vantage of the perceptualist model's presupposition of the subject/object split as ultimate. On the one hand it goes beyond the voluntarist connotations of attentiveness: we notice the women as they come and go, we hear them speaking of Michelangelo, whereas luminosity has more the character of supervening on or occurring to us, like the moment in the rose-garden. On the other hand, whereas the intentionality of sense perception tends to get absorbed with what we are focally aware of, however much luminosity may determine our focal or explicit consciousness at any time, it is always principally operative as implicit or tacit background awareness, to which we respond by articulation in word and deed. Consequently, events of luminosity can never be exhausted by acts of focal awareness, or be brought fully into the foreground of consciousness. We can only become more attuned to luminosity. (Fs) (notabene)

62a I am basically in agreement with these insights into luminosity as profiled against the intentionality-structure of sense perception. But I would prefer not to dissociate luminosity from intentionality, but rather to specify it too in terms of wonder and questioning. With Lonergan I would rather say: "questioning not only is about being but is itself being, being in its Gelichtetheit (luminousness), being in its openness to being, being that is realizing itself through inquiry to knowing that, through knowing, it may come to loving" (1967b:206). What differentiates human being from other conscious beings is that it is a notion of its goal. This means that in wonder or in the pure desire to know, consciousness experiences itself precisely as spiritual or intellectual, inasmuch as the unrestrictedness of its intention--completely universal and utterly concrete--entails an anticipatory grasp of the intelligibility, the unconditionality, and the absoluteness of being. Since, with Aristotle and Aquinas, we are speaking here of an infinite potency (potens omnia facere et fieri), this immediately given luminosity of wonder is not the luminosity of that which it is already, but rather of what in its empty totality it anticipatorily apprehends and longs for, and what it dynamically seeks. I would say that what is most basically meant by luminosity, therefore, is wonder as involving an experiential knowledge of itself (ex parte subjecti) that has not been objectified and so does not involve the objective content of any cognitive act; instead it is an implicit awareness of itself as the principle of such acts, and so it is an inexhaustible background, a tacitly performative awareness. When it is unfolded in particular questions for intelligence, reasonableness, and deliberation, it does so as involuntary occurrence, supervening on sense awareness; and its fulfilment in direct and reflective acts of understanding manifests these same traits: we cannot will either questions or insights; we can only be more or less open to them. (Fs) (notabene)

62b It follows that I would agree in principle with what Voegelin was getting at when he contended that concrete human consciousness "is not an apriori structure, nor does it just happen, nor is its horizon a given [but] a ceaseless action of expanding, ordering, articulating, and correcting itself" (1977:4). The reason for this is that luminosity as wonder is a factual constituent of human consciousness, but in Lonergan's words, "it does not consistently and completely dominate human consciousness. It is a fact to which man has to advert, which he has to acknowledge and accept, whose implications for all his thinking and acting have to be worked out and successfully applied to actual thinking and actual acting" (1967c: 199-200). In short one has to make one's actual horizon match the factual yet merely potential range of primordial wonder's unrestrictedness. (Fs) (notabene)

62c Furthermore, by equating luminosity with primordial wonder as questioning, we can preserve Voegelin's insight into the role of the divine pole in luminosity's achievement by stating simply that God is the ultimate ground of knowledge, but that human beings know because luminosity is an immanent source of transcendence. We know because of our own intelligence whose immanent structures possess a transcendent dynamism. In Thomas Aquinas's formulation, human intelligence is a "created participation of uncreated light." This strengthens Voegelin's idea that attending to luminosity subverts the intentionalist-hypostatizing assumption of the ultimacy of the subject/object split. From the perspective of luminosity as an immanent source of transcendence, the so-called problem of knowledge is transformed. It is not a matter of the subject "in here" moving to objects "out there", but of our moving from an "infinite potentiality commensurate with the universe towards a rational apprehension that siezes the difference of subject and object in essentially the same way that it seizes any other real distinction" (1967:88). (Fs) (notabene)

63a Once we have grasped the distinction between God as the ground of knowledge and human luminosity as an immanent source of transcendence, the possibility also opens up of drawing a radical distinction between classes of horizon-enlargement that may actually arise when the orientation and performances of finite human consciousness really do coincide with the demand implicit in the pure desire to know and "an ultimate enlargement [that] alone approximates to the possibility of openness defined by the pure desire" (Lonergan, 1967c: 200). This distinction is intimately connected with Plato's breakthrough to the Beyond as the creative, divine ground and Aristotle's description of the ground of being as "eternal, immovable, and separate from the change of sense perception" (Voegelin, 1974:245). Thomas Aquinas discerned this distinction from the difference between the adequate object of our desire, namely, videre Deum per essentiam (to know God by his essence), and the proportionate object of our knowledge, namely, realities intrinsically conditioned by space and time (Lonergan, 1967d; 1956:634-730). (Fs) (notabene)

63b On account of the limitations of the proportionate object of our knowing (experienced in the endlessness of the questions for intelligence, reasonableness and responsibility that can be raised), our natural knowledge of God will only admit of analogical-or, to use Voegelin's term, symbolic-fulfilment. But we still naturally desire and are open to essential knowledge of God who is not intrinsically conditioned by space and time. In Thomas's framework, this means the fulfilment of our natural desire to know is supernatural. Accordingly, the class of actual enlargements of horizon "implicit in the very structure of human consciousness," is really distinct from its "ultimate enlargement, beyond the resources of every finite consciousness, where there enters into clear view God as unknown, when the subject knows God face to face" (200). For Christians, the existence of such a fulfilment is known by faith in the beatific vision. But the theoretical distinction between nature and supernature helps the believer to articulate the gift and elevating character of grace, while guarding against any suspicion that God's self-communication is alien or extrinsic to the horizon of human being (Lonergan, 1974). (Fs)