Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Understanding and Being

Titel: Understanding and Being

Stichwort: Explizite Metaphysik, Definition: integrale heuristische Struktur des proportionierten Seins

Kurzinhalt: Explicit Metaphysics

Textausschnitt: () Metaphysics becomes explicit insofar as the implications of the pure desire to know and its unfolding are worked out with regard to the structure of reality and the unification of knowledge. So we come to our definition: explicit metaphysics is the conception, affirmation, and implementation of the integral heuristic structure of proportionate being.
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... metaphysics in two steps. There is, first of all, metaphysics with regard to this world and, secondly, there is the question of the existence of God ... The experiental element is what differentiates proportionate being from being in general.
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What the being is in each particular case - even what proportionate being is - is a question to be answered by a particular science. But, as we have very briefly indicated in these lectures, and as we have attempted to indicate more fully in Insight, the sciences are heuristic. ... Where we ordinarily ask, 'What is the nature of [...]?' the physicist, with a somewhat more elaborate heuristic structure, asks, 'What is the function that governs these phenomena?' and he attempts to determine that function in two ways. First,
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The scientist is heading for something, inquiring into something - 'Think about it precisely; give it a symbol.' What is happening? He is anticipating an act of understanding in which he will understand the data in question and all similar data. The scientist not only anticipates the act of understanding, but he also anticipates the expression of the act of understanding in some conception. Where the mathematician says 'x' and the physicist mentions 'some indeterminate function,' in ordinary speech one says 'the nature of...' What is the nature of light? The nature of light is what we will understand, what we will know, when we understand light. This heuristic procedure anticipates the future act of understanding and its conceptualization, and it uses that anticipation to guide the process towards attaining the act of understanding in question.
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Just as there is heuristic structure with regard to acts of understanding, so there is a total heuristic structure; there is the total goal of intelligent and rational consciousness as such. We have named that goal 'being'. When we speak of knowing being, we mean knowing everything about everything. But we do not know everything about everything; we are simply anticipating the totality of acts of understanding and judgment by which we could completely achieve the ideal, the goal, set us by our desire to know.
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The metaphysician not only posits a general x, being, what one will know when one understands correctly everything about everything, but he can also break being up: into being completely, and being that is proportionate being.
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Any proportionate being will involve what corresponds to the three contents - this is a fundamental premise in our movement towards a metaphysics of proportionate being - and we can name them potency, form, and act. When science reaches its ideal goal of complete understanding of all phenomena, what will science be?
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What is explicit metaphysics? It is the subject achieving self-appropriation, knowing himself as a knower, and using that knowledge to determine the general structure of his possible object and the relations between the particular departments in knowing that object.