Autor: Melchin, R. Kenneth

Buch: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Titel: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Stichwort: Lonergan, Thomas: Wille, Entscheidung - Vernunft; allgemeine Befangenheit (general bias);

Kurzinhalt: ... there lies not a single operation of 'will' but three distinct types of operations, the practical insight, practical reflection (what, in Method, terminates in the judgment of value), and the decision.

Textausschnitt: 7.6.1 Preliminary Clarifications: Intellect and Will

51/7 General bias is the statistical fact that the problems of human living most frequently exceed the developed capacities and skills of human subjects to meet them.1 (227; Fs) (notabene)

Besides the bias of the dramatic subject, of the individual egoist, of the member of a given class or nation, there is a further bias to which all men are prone. For men are rational animals, but full development of their animality is both more common and more rapid than a full development of their intelligence and reasonableness. A traditional view credits children of seven years of age with the attainment of an elementary reasonableness. The law regards as a minor anyone under twenty-one years of age. Experts in the field of public entertainment address themselves to a mental age of about twelve years. Still more modest is the scientific attitude that places man's attainment of knowledge in an indefinitely removed future.2

52/7 The greatest problem involved in coming to understand what Lonergan is trying to grasp and express with his notion of 'general bias' concerns the meaning of the expression 'full development of their intelligence and reasonableness.' There is some evidence within Insight and in a later remark of Lonergan's that in writing Insight, Lonergan was undergoing a development in his view of 'intelligence and reasonableness' as it relates to moral action.3 In his 1941 and 1942 articles in Theological Studies on St. Thomas Aquinas' notion of 'operative grace' (the articles which have since been collected into the volume entitled Grace and Freedom), Lonergan works out Thomas' view of the relationship between intellect and will in terms of a faculty psychology approach.4 This, of course, was the approach of Thomas. And it would seem from his treatment of 'The Notion of Will' in Insight, chapter eighteen,5 that Lonergan maintained the basic distinction between intellect and will that is rooted in this faculty psychology approach. But there is also some considerable evidence in Insight, chapter eighteen, that Lonergan had already modified his conception of the role of 'intellect' in moral action to the point where a more traditional distinction between 'intellect' and 'will' (a distinction rooted in a faculty psychology approach) was no longer tenable. By the time of Method in Theology (1972) Lonergan had come to casting his analysis in terms of an 'intentionality analysis' approach that was sufficiently different from the older approach as to require a rejection of the older term 'will.' (228; Fs)

Again, [decision] is not to be conceived as an act of will. To speak of an act of will is to suppose the metaphysical context of a faculty psychology. But to speak of the fourth level of human consciousness, the level on which consciousness becomes conscience, is to suppose the context of intentionality analysis. Decision is responsible and it is free, but it is the work not of a metaphysical will but of conscience and, indeed, when a conversion, the work of a good conscience.6

53/7 In Grace and Freedom, Lonergan points to a discovery of Dom Lottin's as an important moment in explaining Thomas' account of the relationship between intellect and will. The challenge to Thomas presented by the Parisian Averroists' doctrine of determinism was the occasion for Thomas' own refinement in his understanding of the operation of the will. If the specification and the exercise of the act of will are both caused by intellect, then free will is finally precluded. For the will would then be activated by anything that occurs to intellect. Thomas' response to this dilemma was to specify four presuppositions necessary for an act of free will: (228f; Fs) (notabene)

[...] (A) a field of action in which more than one course of action is objectively possible; (B) an intellect that is able to work out more than one course of action; (C) a will that is not automatically determined by the first course of action that occurs to the intellect; and, since this condition is only a condition, securing indeterminacy without telling what in fact does determine, (D) a will that moves itself. All four are asserted by St. Thomas but with varying degrees of emphasis at different times.7 (notabene)

54/7 Following Aristotle, St. Thomas took for granted a faculty of will, distinct from the faculty of intellect, with a distinct object of desire, the good in general.8 And in an effort to develop an explanation of free, moral action he affirmed both a link between the two faculties and a distinction in their operation. (229; Fs)

Finally, while it was always maintained that the will is not determined by the intellect, it is only in the De malo and the Prima secundae that one finds an explicit answer to the question: What does determine the will? As we have seen, Aristotelian passivity of appetite is then transcended and the freedom of man yields place to the freedom of the will; in consequence, attention is concentrated on the negative factor that the will is not determined by the intellect, and on the positive factor that the will moves itself and in this self-motion is always free either to act or not act.9

55/7 The point to be observed here is that for Thomas intellect and will are presupposed, from the outset, to be the two distinct categories in whose terms the problem of freedom is to be resolved.10 There is some clue in these passages that intellect performs different types of functions with respect to different types of objects when it conceives and judges truths of fact, on the one hand, and when it conceived and judges possible courses of action, on the other. But nothing more is made of this clue either by Thomas or by Lonergan in Grace and Freedom. The problem of freedom is not to be resolved in terms of a radical set of differences in types or levels of 'conscious' operation each involving some role of intelligent emergence. It is to be resolved in terms of a distinct category, the will. (229; Fs)

56/7 In Insight, chapter eighteen, considerably more is made of the different types of conscious operations, all involving intelligence, and the distinct objects towards which they move. (229; Fs)

The detached, disinterested, unrestricted desire to know grasps intelligently and affirms reasonably not only the facts of the universe of being but also its practical possibilities. Such practical possibilities include intelligent transformations not only of the environment in which man lives but also of man's own spontaneous living. For that living exhibits an otherwise coincidental manifold into which man can introduce a higher system by his own understanding of himself and his own deliberate choices. So it is that the detached and disinterested desire extends its sphere of influence from the field of cognitional activities through the field of knowledge into the field of deliberate human acts.11

57/7 It is generally recognized that in the Verbum articles Lonergan discovered St. Thomas to be working with a view of intellect which recognized not one but two distinct types of operations, the operations of insight or understanding and the operation of judgment. It would appear that in Insight Lonergan was on the verge of a further discovery, a discovery which would eventually expand the older faculty psychology distinction between intellect and will into a series of circularly operating schemes involving something like fourteen distinct acts progressing cumulatively towards transformations on at least four distinct levels and on two further sub-levels.12 The first piece of evidence which seems to have struck Lonergan was Thomas' observation that intellect can not only have insights and make judgments about matters of fact, it can also have insights and make judgments about practical courses of action which are not yet fact. The twofold scheme of insight and judgment is operative in each case, but in Insight Lonergan takes great pains to point out the radical differences in the intention of the questions and the status of the answers in each pair of operations. (230; Fs)

However, while the speculative or factual insight is followed by the question whether the unity exists or whether the correlation governs events, the practical insight is followed by the question whether the unity is going to be made to exist or whether the correlation is going to be made to govern events. In other words, while speculative and factual insights are concerned to lead to knowledge of being, practical insights are concerned to lead to the making of being. Their objective is not what is but what is to be done. They reveal, not the unities and relations of things as they are, but the unities and relations of possible courses of action.

There follows another important corollary. When speculative or factual insight is correct, reflective understanding can grasp a relevant virtually unconditioned. But when practical insight is correct, then reflective understanding cannot grasp a relevant virtually unconditioned; for if it could, the content of the insight already would be a fact; and if it were already a fact, then it would not be a possible course of action which, as yet, is not a fact but just a possibility.13

58/7 The practical insight and its corresponding reflection do not head towards truth. Rather, they head towards value. 'Now it is in rational, moral self-consciousness that the good as value comes to light, for the value is the good as the possible object of rational choice.'14 But values do not remain as objects of understanding and judgment. Beyond the practical insight and its corresponding judgment lies the actuation of the value, the execution of the course of action. It is in his account of the 'decision' that Lonergan tries to integrate this developed set of distinctions into an overarching faculty psychology framework of intellect and will. And, in so doing, Lonergan shows up the serious inadequacy of this older framework. For by now Lonergan had discovered that beyond the levels of experience, understanding and judgment, there lies not a single operation of 'will' but three distinct types of operations, the practical insight, practical reflection (what, in Method, terminates in the judgment of value), and the decision.15 It is in Method that Lonergan focuses on the distinctiveness of the practical reflective operation to highlight the way in which judgments of value integrate the spontaneous orientation of the subject towards value in feelings.16 But in Insight practical reflection had already been noted as a distinct operation. (230f; Fs) (notabene)

Secondly, though the reflection heads beyond knowing to doing, still it consists simply in knowing. Thus, it may reveal that the proposed action is concretely possible, clearly effective, highly agreeable, quite useful, morally obligatory, etc. But it is one thing to know exactly what could be done and all the reasons for doing it. It is quite another for such knowledge to issue in doing.17 (231; Fs)

59/7 From the very beginning of his eighteenth chapter, Lonergan recognizes that the will is not discontinuous with intellect, but a further, distinguishable function of intellect itself. (231; Fs)

[...] the goodness of being comes to light only by considering the extension of intellectual activity that we name deliberation and decision, choice and will [...] Further, willing is rational and so moral.18 (231; Fs) (notabene)

60/7 But it would appear that Lonergan's inclination to cast his analysis in the terms of the faculty psychology distinction between intellect and will prevailed over this insight into the continuity. And so he brings his account of will with the more traditional analogy of sensitive hunger. (231; Fs)

Will, then, is intellectual or spiritual appetite. As capacity for sensitive hunger stands to sensible food, so will stands to objects presented by intellect.19

61/7 There is a sense in which this analogy to sensitive hunger remains true through both Insight and Method. For appetite is understood by Lonergan as a dynamic orientation of a whole human person to take up environmental materials and to transform them or integrate them in the performance of a skill.20 But the problem with this traditional analogy is that it also evoked the traditional conception of will as ordered towards the object of intellect. The faculty psychology approach began with a categorical distinction between intellect and will and argued to will's independence from intellect, on the one hand, and to its orientation towards the objects of intellect, on the other. In 'Insight. ' Lonergan had assembled all the materials for conceiving will as a set of distinct acts and schemes of acts, involving some occurrence of an emergent integration, on the one hand, and all ordered towards an object which is distinct from the object of the 'speculative' operation of intelligence, on the other. (231f; Fs)

62/7 With his framework of emergent probability Lonergan had set the grounds for conceiving 'will' in a radically new way, as a part of a larger recurring skill or scheme of acts whose developed performance yields a more or less intelligent integration of the (biological, aesthetic, affective, intelligent, reasonable, intersubjective, historical) experiential materials of a human subject and which is oriented towards the grasp, the affirmation and the actuation of courses of action which transform and constitute both the subject and his or her environment. All of these elements are present in Insight, chapter eighteen. But the traditional faculty psychology approach tended to prevail in Lonergan's attempts to specify the precise function of the 'will' precisely because the context of his analysis was the traditional scholastic question of the independence of the will from the determining constraints of rational necessity.21 So he defines the will as 'an exigence for self-consistency in knowing and doing.'22 And in so doing he obscures both the continuity of intelligence in its various functions throughout the whole operation of 'will' and the distinctiveness of 'will's' own object. (232; Fs)

But the rationality of decision emerges in the demand of the rationally conscious subject for consistency between his knowing and his deciding and doing [...] But the final enlargement and transformation of consciousness consists in the empirically, intelligently, and rationally conscious subject
(1) demanding conformity of his doing to his knowing, and
(2) acceding to that demand by deciding reasonably.23

63/7 When it is understood that by 'knowing' Lonergan does not mean knowing truth but 'knowing' the value of a possible and probable course of action, his definition begins to ring true. And when it is understood that the object of this 'demand for conformity' is the comprehensive integration of the enormous manifold of skills of the person or people involved in accordance with this 'projected' course of action, then the act of will begins to appear less as the passive submission of humanity to the imperious demands of intellect and more as the heroic work of intelligent devotion and love creatively cultivating and actuating the fragile directives of truth and value. (232; Fs)

64/7 All of this brings us back to the issue of the general bias. On the basis of the above evidence it would be fair to conclude that when Lonergan speaks of 'full development of their intelligence and reasonableness' his intended meaning would be obscured badly by contrasting 'intelligence and reasonableness' either with 'willing' or with sensitive spontaneity. The general bias does not apply solely to knowledge of facts but more generally to the cultivation of intelligently mediated spontaneously operative skills on all levels of what Lonergan subsequently comes to call 'conscious intentionality.' I would suggest that what Lonergan had in mind in writing his account of the general bias was something that he came to call in Method a problem of 'horizons,' where the word 'horizons' designates both the limitations in what one can conceive as possible, and the limitations in developed capacities and skills which usually go hand in hand with an earlier stage in development, with a deficiency in experiential range or with a distortion in operational authenticity.24 And so even though Lonergan would seem to define willing as seeking conformity to knowledge and even though he seems to characterize the basic problem in the human condition in terms of insufficient knowledge, I would argue that both of these expressions tend to diverge from, rather than converge upon his emergent probability conception of humanity and world process in Insight. (232f; Fs)