Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Extroversion, distinctio, Konzeptualist

Kurzinhalt: Neigung z. Extroversion, distinctio realis, Konversion

Textausschnitt: eg: Notwendigkeit der Konverison zur Erfassung der realen distinctio

20/9 This 'real distinction' between essence and existence, ultimately rooted in the real distinction between understanding and judgment, was the core of Lonergan's own 'intellectual conversion' in Bernard Leeming's course on the Incarnate Word in Rome in the mid-1930s. By the mid-forties and his studies of Aquinas he was arriving at expressing that distinction ever more clearly. The culminating step would be his writing of Insight. (143f; Fs)

21/9 An intellectual conversion is needed to grasp all this. So pervasive is 'the native tendency to extroversion' that it appears in a multiplicity of guises. Typically it is found in conceptualist philosophies that are so focussed on concepts that they miss the intellect from which they emerge. 'For intellectual habit is not possession of the book but freedom from the book. It is the birth and life in us of the light and evidence by which we operate on our own.'1 On the contrary, 'Con-ceptualists conceive human intellect only in terms of what it does; but their neglect of what intellect is, prior to what it does, has a variety of causes. Most commonly they do not advert to the act of understanding. They take concepts for granted; they are busy working out arguments to produce certitudes; they prolong their spontaneous tendencies to extroversion into philosophy, where they concentrate on metaphysics and neglect gnoseology.'2 (144; Fs)

22/9 The Aristotelian-Thomist program is not the simple matter of conceiving understanding as some kind of a 'spiritual look' in the tradition of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. (144; Fs)
We can have no knowledge of our intellects except by reflecting on our own acts of understanding. Evidently, the Aristotelian and Thomist program is not a matter of considering ocular vision and then conceiving an analogous spiritual vision that is attributed to a spiritual faculty named intellect. On the contrary, it is a process of introspection that discovers the act of insight into the phantasm and the definition as an expression of the insight, that almost catches intellect in its forward movement towards defining and its backward reference to sense for the concrete realization of the defined.3

23/9 Toward the end of Verbum Lonergan pays tribute to Aquinas' transposition of Aristotle, instead of taking up as his working philosophy the various forms of Platonism that were available. 'Least of all could Aquinas have lost himself in the Platonist fog and at the same time steadily progressed from the Sentences toward the clear and calm, the economic and functional, the balanced and exact series of questions and articles of the via doctrinae in the Summa, in which the intellectualism of Aristotle, made over into the intellectualism of St. Thomas shines as unmistakenly as the sun on the noonday summer hills of Italy.'4 (144; Fs)
24/9 It is in conjunction with these Verbum articles that we find Lonergan's first use of the phrase 'intellectual conversion.' In an early draft of the articles, written around 1945, Lonergan discussed Cajetan's opposition to Scotus: (145; Fs)

But Cajetan was not born an anti-Scotist. He underwent an intellectual conversion [...]. But if Cajetan had to have a conversion to grasp the Aristotelian theory of knowledge by identity, may one not say that that theory is anything but obvious?5

25/9 In conjunction with these emphases in the Verbum articles, we can also point to some other brief statements in book reviews written in the late 1940s. For example, regarding a collection of commentaries on medieval issues, including the real distinction between essence and existence, Lonergan writes: 'George Klubertanz, S.J., deals with the same question in St. Bonaventure, to find that esse and essentia do not differ, while existere, in its technical sense, meant for St. Bonaventure esse hic et nunc; it would seem that there is a patron saint for the naive epistemologists who are concerned exclusively with the real as 'something out there.'6 (145; Fs)

26/9 In another review of Dom Illtyd Trethowan's Certainty: Philosophical and Theological, Lonergan criticizes the author's 'dogmatic intuitionism.' For Trethowan knowledge is intuitive apprehension of certainty, whether in the natural or supernatural order. (145; Fs)
Unfortunately the postulated intuitions do not seem to exist. In its first moment on each level, knowledge seems to be act, perfection, identity; such identity of itself is not a confrontation; confrontation does arise, but only in a second moment and by a distinct act, of perception as distinct from sensation, of conception as distinct from insight, of judgment as distinct from reflective understanding. On this showing confrontation is not primitive, but derived; and it is derived from what is not confrontation, not intuition, nor formal and explicit duality.7

27/9 Lonergan goes on to admit the difficulty of accepting the view he is proposing. It demands a momentous personal change. 'Admittedly it is difficult to justify such derivation. Overtly to accept such difficulty is a basic and momentous philosophic option.' Even the eminent historian of philosophy, Etienne Gilson, is not spared the critique of intuitionism. In a generally favorable review Lonergan adds the reservation: 'Finally, the insistence upon a 'return to sense' and the affirmation of an intuitive experience of acts of existing (pp. 206 f.) are strangely reminiscent of something like Kierkegaard's esthetic sphere of existential subjectivity.'8