Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas

Titel: Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas

Stichwort: Zusammenfassung: Analogie der materia: drei Arten von materia: Gattung, Buchstabe (Holz), Kreissegment

Kurzinhalt: höhere Einheit (im Ggs zu Plato und Kant): indirekte Erkenntnis der materia: antecedent, simultaneous, consequents suppositions; natural form is to natural matter as intelligible form is to sensible matter

Textausschnitt: 262 In any case let us close this section with a summary account of the analogy of matter. In the first instance, matter is the matter of common sense, the wood of the table and the bronze in a statue. But unless corrected, that notion easily leads to materialism, whether the crude materialism of the old naturalists or the elaborate materialism of the nineteenth-century atomists, who equally considered the real to be the sensible. On the other hand, the material world is neither sheer flux, as for Plato, nor unknowable in itself, as for Kant. The higher synthesis of these opposites lies in defining matter as what is known by intellect indirectly. Directly intellect knows forms, species, quiddities; but these knowns have antecedent suppositions, simultaneous suppositions, and consequents, all of which, as such, are indirectly known. (157; Fs) (notabene)

263 Antecedent suppositions are matter in the sense that genus is named matter and specific difference is named form, and again in the sense that substance is named matter and accident is named form; such usage is Aristotelian and Thomist but still somewhat improper. Simultaneous suppositions fall into two classes: if they pertain to the intelligible unity of the form, as letters to syllable, they are parts of the form, de ratione speciei, and in Thomist usage common matter; if they do not pertain to the intelligible unity of the form yet are ever included in some fashion in the concrete presentation, they are partes materiae or material conditions or individual matter. Finally, consequents that are contingent and potential, as segments to circles, are again partes materiae. Clearly, it is the second of these three types of indirectly knowns that offers the principal meaning of the term 'matter,' and it is this meaning that the analogy of matter considers chiefly. The general analogy is the proportion of wood to tables and bronze to statues; but the specifically Aristotelian analogy is that natural form is to natural matter as intelligible form is to sensible matter,1 that is, as the object of insight is to the object of sense. (157f; Fs) (notabene)