Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas

Titel: Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas

Stichwort: Leben -> Aktualisierung der Potentialität des natürlichen Lichtes (Schema); Prinzip des Auschluss des Dritten

Kurzinhalt: child -> learn to distinguish between fact and fiction; to say that any X is real is just to assign it a place in that scheme; how do we grasp the scheme itself? At its root it is just the principle of excluded middle

Textausschnitt: The child has to learn to distinguish sharply between fact and fiction; the young man has not yet acquired a sufficiently nuanced grasp of human living for the study of ethics to be profitable; each of us, confronted with something outside the beaten track of our experience, turns to the expert to be taught just what it is. Still, in all this progress we are but discriminating, differentiating, categorizing the details of a scheme that somehow we possessed from the start. To say that any X is real is just to assign it a place in that scheme; to deny the reality of any Y is to deny it a place in the universal scheme.
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But how do we grasp the scheme itself? At its root it is just the principle of excluded middle: X either is or else is not. And in its details the scheme is just the actuation of our capacity to conceive any essence and rationally affirm its existence and its relations. Since within that scheme both we ourselves and all our acts of conceiving and of judging are no more than particular and not too important items, the critical problem - and this is our second remark - is not a problem of moving from within outwards, of moving from a subject to an object outside the subject. It is a problem of moving from above downwards, of moving from an infinite potentiality commensurate with the universe towards a rational apprehension that seizes the difference of subject and object in essentially the same way that it seizes any other real distinction. Thus