Subsidiarity and the Economy
Lonergan wanted to find a solution to the slump which would come ‘from below’, from the banks and businesses, from the workers and from the consumers. He wanted to avoid placing the economy in the hands of expert economists and the State. For this reason he was opposed to John Maynard Keynes who would deal with a slump by deficit spending. He thought dependence that way would harm human welfare, reducing the actual flow of goods and services. He praised Capitalism for seeking to meet effective demand, seeking to supply what people wanted and could pay for.
In the 1940’s he saw the problem as emerging from a lack of investment. In the 1970’s he followed critics of the multinational firms, but he did not produce a major work on the matter. He urged a creative collaboration from many disciplines.
One way of solving the lack of investment problem is of course to bring about a great new investment in a needed area, and I would suggest that energy supply is exactly an area which, with old plants failing, calls for heavy investment.
I am not for various reasons suggesting nuclear energy but I believe Iceland has beyond banks some thermal conditions which would allow the supply of a deal of energy. The financing of this could be a private, should be private. The capital injected would go out in wages and stimulate demand. Properly designed our future energy requirements would be met. Something similar could be done with the Wash and the Bristol Channel.
Of course, for a global economy to recover by way of investment there would need to be similar projects everywhere.
Howsoever, let us suppose we extend the boom this way for 20 years, when it comes to an end we would face the same problem again.
In the absence of such major investment my solution to the credit crunch is tax cuts on business, no VAT, and a care to charge only a reasonable mark up.
Sitting in the Presbytery the truth is I have no clear idea of what a reasonable mark up should be. Companies will need to repair their equipment, they may need new investment. May I suggest the mark up should just cover repairs? The banks are there to create credit for vast new projects. So if the water board is making a new reservoir it should not raise the money from the customer, except when by increasing supplies it increases revenues. It is not the task of the customer to be forced to be a capitalist as well, and without the benefit which comes from taking a well judged risk.
Tuesday 23 December 2008
Meanings and Values
Someone was speaking about ‘Catholic values’ and I felt I might be in the realm of pious platitudes. Could one say, from a personal stance, values are dearly held commitments? So that a Catholic value would be the dearly held commitment to get myself to Mass on a Sunday, if possible, even when one is on holiday?
The valuing, the personal commitment, does not make the value. The value is valuable in its own right. I recall at university in the 1960s coming across some paper about the likely effect of a nuclear war. Whole territories would be wiped out. I found myself desolated at such a prospect, and committed if possible to find another way. I was recognising the value of human life and agreeing with the teaching of the Church which condemned the mass destruction of cities. The same value can be expressed as a principle and deeply held as a conviction, as a commitment. As an insight leads to conceptualisation, commitment may lead to expression in principles. It seems to me though that commitment may bind one without it being expressed in abstract principles. A parent might be committed to his daughter’s education without abstracting about the matter.
Values are expressed in commitments and lived. Good people are not all ethicists or moral theologians. A good person though might confront a dilemma and be helped to reach a decision by someone who has studied the matter. We meet here the idea of substructure and superstructure. One person has the substructure of a good will in operation. The expert though is able to help by having a reflective superstructure, rather as human life is lived with meanings and values by one group and thematised by historians. One concludes that though we don’t all have to be experts in morals it is helpful to all if there are some such experts around in the community in a vital and interactive way.
There needs to be ‘a teaching’ if those who are living in a substructural way, without too much analysis, are to be guided, and the ‘good will’ of the good person needs to move confidently to the advice and instruction of those who are expert. There is a submissiveness here but it is for the sake of life, excellence and achievement of some sort.
I have the sense that there needs to be some restoration of confidence in this area. I me someone recently who was talking about a person who was a good Christian as well as a Catholic, as if Catholicism was a sort of drag, contained a bias, against being a good Christian.
Fr Lonergan in his Third Collection writes about authenticity, about self transcendence and about norms belonging to attentiveness, intelligence, rationality and conduct so that we live with truth, reality and the excellence of goodness, the happiness of a clear conscience.
The values we have to recognise are not simply deontological but also, to coin a term, dehistorical. We need to recognise that we have a body which is alive and that life is always a divine gift, so we should not bump people off, ourselves or other people (deontological values). We need to recognise that we are historically conditioned and that issues have emerged which it is a duty to address, racialism for example or the way through the present ‘credit crunch’. Current permissiveness and abortion might seem to be simply ‘deontological’ issues, but the issue seems to stand with historical ideas, like the woman’s right to choose, or the way ‘a civilised society’ deals with private sexual morality or ‘human rights’. Civilised values, to be truly civilised, need the realism to recognise their deontological base.
By authenticity, Lonergan means something cumulative over time. So Newman at one stage thought he ought to be an angel and there had been a mistake, that he ought to be an evangelist, that he ought to be a Catholic (but not a Roman Catholic) and then that he ought to be a Roman Catholic. These are changes of position (should we call them ‘conversions’?) whereby he moves from thinking he is an angel entrapped in flesh to accepting that he has the down to earth dignity of a human being combined with the baptismal grace which made him a child of God. A secular example of authenticity is that of Eddington who before the First War got interested in Einstein, who during the war stayed loyal to that interest despite strong pressure against because Einstein was German, and who after the war, verified his theory at some expense. (I have seen it said that the cloud cover on the occasion of the eclipse was so great that Eddington could not have verified the theory. If so that would be inauthenticity, showing that the cumulative product can be rare.)
Authenticity issues in self transcendence. Perhaps self transcendence is not a perfect term for it rather implies that the self is left behind, whereas the point is that the life of the self requires going beyond the self but in a way which involves the self with another of some sort.
There is a problem here for we cannot avoid being the central figure in our flesh and blood experiences. The problem was solved by the Greeks in that we choose what is more excellent and we do choose what is most excellent, wisdom, by which we recognise another.
Lonergan has us oriented to self transcendence by the dreams of the morning in which, though as victims, we are in symbolic mood facing the challenge of the day and of life. He has us waking to a world of sensible stimuli, like toothpaste and cups of coffee, and I recognise here the world of animal extroversion which stays with us all the time since we are animals, set to jump if there is a big bang. As shaped up by our parents, by human history, by our personal splash we find ourselves living beyond animal extroversion in a world mediated by meaning and motivated by values.
Between the dream and consciousness symbols have the difference that they can become utterly precise and demanding. At Downside the bell rang and though still half asleep we had to get up and go through our hygienic ablutions in preparation for Holy Mass. By symbol we are oriented to action and so to the mighty stage of history. If the bell is a symbol mediating meaning and value, life thereafter included systems of symbols coming at one to be mastered, the language, mathematics, physics, chemistry, the game of rugby. In Easter and Summer terms I found relief in catching trout which I suppose was a near return to the world of animal extroversion. Nothing was ever more surprising and exciting.
Still by work and signs and examples one came to know the world one lived in and how one should conduct oneself, meanings and values. Truth to tell, meanings and disvalues as well. There was the public school world and the rest of the world and was not Downside the Eton of the Catholic Schools? About growing in wisdom there is a lot of unlearning the tradition one has received, so that coming to live in the real world is a continuous conversion helped by symbolic structures and also by other people in the richness and also the poverty of their living.
Undergirding authenticity and self transcendence Lonergan has the term normative. ‘Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible.’ There are norms at each level, so if there is cloud cover one should not pretend to astronomical observations. The norms around the precept ‘be responsible’ are different from the others, for ‘be responsible’ requires that there be options. The precept is concerned with how one should use one’s freedom. The self transcendence of knowing brings the self into knowledge of the world. How one should act though, except in extraordinary circumstances, gives one a set of options and so you get deliberation and choice. By free choice one changes the world, other people and above all ones own self.
There is a dreaming self transcendence of a sort, a sensitive self transcendence, a cognitive self transcendence and a performative self transcendence but these all occur in the context of an affective self transcendence which may be more in potency than act. Our living finds its meaning in love, at the heart of which is or is not the love of God. In a world of distractions and biases, of cares and worries, the awareness of the centrality of God’s love needs to be reflected upon, understood and assiduously cared about. You get the world of religion with morning prayer and night prayer. You get intimacy with the sacrament and sacramentality of marriage. You get a relevant loyalty with sincere and effective love of neighbour even across the sea, even in the distant future.
The valuing, the personal commitment, does not make the value. The value is valuable in its own right. I recall at university in the 1960s coming across some paper about the likely effect of a nuclear war. Whole territories would be wiped out. I found myself desolated at such a prospect, and committed if possible to find another way. I was recognising the value of human life and agreeing with the teaching of the Church which condemned the mass destruction of cities. The same value can be expressed as a principle and deeply held as a conviction, as a commitment. As an insight leads to conceptualisation, commitment may lead to expression in principles. It seems to me though that commitment may bind one without it being expressed in abstract principles. A parent might be committed to his daughter’s education without abstracting about the matter.
Values are expressed in commitments and lived. Good people are not all ethicists or moral theologians. A good person though might confront a dilemma and be helped to reach a decision by someone who has studied the matter. We meet here the idea of substructure and superstructure. One person has the substructure of a good will in operation. The expert though is able to help by having a reflective superstructure, rather as human life is lived with meanings and values by one group and thematised by historians. One concludes that though we don’t all have to be experts in morals it is helpful to all if there are some such experts around in the community in a vital and interactive way.
There needs to be ‘a teaching’ if those who are living in a substructural way, without too much analysis, are to be guided, and the ‘good will’ of the good person needs to move confidently to the advice and instruction of those who are expert. There is a submissiveness here but it is for the sake of life, excellence and achievement of some sort.
I have the sense that there needs to be some restoration of confidence in this area. I me someone recently who was talking about a person who was a good Christian as well as a Catholic, as if Catholicism was a sort of drag, contained a bias, against being a good Christian.
Fr Lonergan in his Third Collection writes about authenticity, about self transcendence and about norms belonging to attentiveness, intelligence, rationality and conduct so that we live with truth, reality and the excellence of goodness, the happiness of a clear conscience.
The values we have to recognise are not simply deontological but also, to coin a term, dehistorical. We need to recognise that we have a body which is alive and that life is always a divine gift, so we should not bump people off, ourselves or other people (deontological values). We need to recognise that we are historically conditioned and that issues have emerged which it is a duty to address, racialism for example or the way through the present ‘credit crunch’. Current permissiveness and abortion might seem to be simply ‘deontological’ issues, but the issue seems to stand with historical ideas, like the woman’s right to choose, or the way ‘a civilised society’ deals with private sexual morality or ‘human rights’. Civilised values, to be truly civilised, need the realism to recognise their deontological base.
By authenticity, Lonergan means something cumulative over time. So Newman at one stage thought he ought to be an angel and there had been a mistake, that he ought to be an evangelist, that he ought to be a Catholic (but not a Roman Catholic) and then that he ought to be a Roman Catholic. These are changes of position (should we call them ‘conversions’?) whereby he moves from thinking he is an angel entrapped in flesh to accepting that he has the down to earth dignity of a human being combined with the baptismal grace which made him a child of God. A secular example of authenticity is that of Eddington who before the First War got interested in Einstein, who during the war stayed loyal to that interest despite strong pressure against because Einstein was German, and who after the war, verified his theory at some expense. (I have seen it said that the cloud cover on the occasion of the eclipse was so great that Eddington could not have verified the theory. If so that would be inauthenticity, showing that the cumulative product can be rare.)
Authenticity issues in self transcendence. Perhaps self transcendence is not a perfect term for it rather implies that the self is left behind, whereas the point is that the life of the self requires going beyond the self but in a way which involves the self with another of some sort.
There is a problem here for we cannot avoid being the central figure in our flesh and blood experiences. The problem was solved by the Greeks in that we choose what is more excellent and we do choose what is most excellent, wisdom, by which we recognise another.
Lonergan has us oriented to self transcendence by the dreams of the morning in which, though as victims, we are in symbolic mood facing the challenge of the day and of life. He has us waking to a world of sensible stimuli, like toothpaste and cups of coffee, and I recognise here the world of animal extroversion which stays with us all the time since we are animals, set to jump if there is a big bang. As shaped up by our parents, by human history, by our personal splash we find ourselves living beyond animal extroversion in a world mediated by meaning and motivated by values.
Between the dream and consciousness symbols have the difference that they can become utterly precise and demanding. At Downside the bell rang and though still half asleep we had to get up and go through our hygienic ablutions in preparation for Holy Mass. By symbol we are oriented to action and so to the mighty stage of history. If the bell is a symbol mediating meaning and value, life thereafter included systems of symbols coming at one to be mastered, the language, mathematics, physics, chemistry, the game of rugby. In Easter and Summer terms I found relief in catching trout which I suppose was a near return to the world of animal extroversion. Nothing was ever more surprising and exciting.
Still by work and signs and examples one came to know the world one lived in and how one should conduct oneself, meanings and values. Truth to tell, meanings and disvalues as well. There was the public school world and the rest of the world and was not Downside the Eton of the Catholic Schools? About growing in wisdom there is a lot of unlearning the tradition one has received, so that coming to live in the real world is a continuous conversion helped by symbolic structures and also by other people in the richness and also the poverty of their living.
Undergirding authenticity and self transcendence Lonergan has the term normative. ‘Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible.’ There are norms at each level, so if there is cloud cover one should not pretend to astronomical observations. The norms around the precept ‘be responsible’ are different from the others, for ‘be responsible’ requires that there be options. The precept is concerned with how one should use one’s freedom. The self transcendence of knowing brings the self into knowledge of the world. How one should act though, except in extraordinary circumstances, gives one a set of options and so you get deliberation and choice. By free choice one changes the world, other people and above all ones own self.
There is a dreaming self transcendence of a sort, a sensitive self transcendence, a cognitive self transcendence and a performative self transcendence but these all occur in the context of an affective self transcendence which may be more in potency than act. Our living finds its meaning in love, at the heart of which is or is not the love of God. In a world of distractions and biases, of cares and worries, the awareness of the centrality of God’s love needs to be reflected upon, understood and assiduously cared about. You get the world of religion with morning prayer and night prayer. You get intimacy with the sacrament and sacramentality of marriage. You get a relevant loyalty with sincere and effective love of neighbour even across the sea, even in the distant future.
Economic Supplement 7
Reducing VAT
The purpose of an economy is to organise work upon the potencies of nature so that goods and services may stream forth to supply man’s needs.
When there is a deal of investment going on then there is a division of resources so that some are going, not directly to produce goods and services for households (for government and people), but to provide equipment for future production or education for future services.
G.D.P., Gross Domestic Product, is a familiar term but it lumps together current output for consumption and output sold to raise productivity in the future, concrete investment. So GDP is equal to output for consumption plus output for concrete investment. If investment is high people will be consuming less. Nevertheless it will be experienced as a boom time. People are employed. Prices are high, but everyone can afford something.
In a so called slump time, since investment has fallen away, output for consumption could increase. The trouble is that at current prices, only so much output can be afforded. With unemployment rising, the welfare state is likely to get into debt preventing dire poverty.
If the government reduces VAT then it may hope that prices may fall, more will be purchased as so what it loses in VAT it may recoup by less payments for unemployment benefit. For as more ‘output for consumption’ is sold so more people will be needed to work to make these things.
It could not be done overnight, but I would like VAT to be reduced to zero and corporation tax likewise. The task of business is to produce goods and services as cheaply as possible.
It is true that, if government requires 45% of the total output for consumption then income tax will need to be, on average, 45% of income, but the need for taxation is at the heart of politics and it is a good thing if the quantities can be seen clearly. ‘No taxation without representation’ is an ancient principle.
Apart from war, there are two ways of avoiding slump. The first is a widespread fall, not in inflation but in actual prices for consumers. The other is major new investment. I guess, actually, we need major new investment in energy provision. If the electricity goes off nothing in this house works and I hade best go to bed and perhaps expire. I gather there is energy in Iceland in the way of thermal activity. If the government assisted private investment in this area I think it would be promoting the common good and considerably easing the slump.
The purpose of an economy is to organise work upon the potencies of nature so that goods and services may stream forth to supply man’s needs.
When there is a deal of investment going on then there is a division of resources so that some are going, not directly to produce goods and services for households (for government and people), but to provide equipment for future production or education for future services.
G.D.P., Gross Domestic Product, is a familiar term but it lumps together current output for consumption and output sold to raise productivity in the future, concrete investment. So GDP is equal to output for consumption plus output for concrete investment. If investment is high people will be consuming less. Nevertheless it will be experienced as a boom time. People are employed. Prices are high, but everyone can afford something.
In a so called slump time, since investment has fallen away, output for consumption could increase. The trouble is that at current prices, only so much output can be afforded. With unemployment rising, the welfare state is likely to get into debt preventing dire poverty.
If the government reduces VAT then it may hope that prices may fall, more will be purchased as so what it loses in VAT it may recoup by less payments for unemployment benefit. For as more ‘output for consumption’ is sold so more people will be needed to work to make these things.
It could not be done overnight, but I would like VAT to be reduced to zero and corporation tax likewise. The task of business is to produce goods and services as cheaply as possible.
It is true that, if government requires 45% of the total output for consumption then income tax will need to be, on average, 45% of income, but the need for taxation is at the heart of politics and it is a good thing if the quantities can be seen clearly. ‘No taxation without representation’ is an ancient principle.
Apart from war, there are two ways of avoiding slump. The first is a widespread fall, not in inflation but in actual prices for consumers. The other is major new investment. I guess, actually, we need major new investment in energy provision. If the electricity goes off nothing in this house works and I hade best go to bed and perhaps expire. I gather there is energy in Iceland in the way of thermal activity. If the government assisted private investment in this area I think it would be promoting the common good and considerably easing the slump.
Metaphysics
One of us proposed the principle, from nothing, nothing comes as a clear point of metaphysics. It follows, of course, that since there is something, there must be God. There remains the task of proving something exists.
Lonergan says something similar about evolution, ‘It is only the cause of the whole universe that from lower species can bring about the emergence of successive higher species.’ (Third Collection, 24) I don’t know what Hawkins would make of that – the point thought would remain that to prove God’s existence this way you would have to prove the evolution of species. One recalls the teaching of Vatican One that from created things, God’s existence could be proved. It did not say it had been proved.
Such a high level of metaphysics fulfils Aristotle’s claim that we know when we now the cause. Put simply, we know when we can say ‘because’. The metaphysics that emerges would apply to any created universe. It is interesting that the Greeks so far as I know did not hold the idea of nothingness and creation very clearly. There was a tendency to think of the material order as eternal and the divine was at work helping the philosopher in his work. The idea of nothingness, creation and God comes from the faith perspective. False Gods are ‘not things’. Augustine (d. 430) is already clear. The matter is declared solemnly at the 4th Lateran Council (1215) ‘God made all things visible and invisible out of nothing’.
One realises, with a certain shock, that the ability to say ‘out of nothing, nothing comes’ could not have been said by the Jahwist theologian who composed Genesis II at the time of King Solomon. God fashioned everything. Bara, the word for creation, came from fashioning a quill pen. Our power of conception and expression is historically conditioned. We get enlightened by a genuine movement forward, Cardinal Newman’s ‘Development of Doctrine’. I think here it is helpful to recall Lonergan’s position that ideas have dates and history can be scientifically ordered. So, after the Lateran Council we find Aquinas making a clear distinction between essence and existence, things possible and things actual.
It remains that metaphysics belongs to this world as well as any possible world. Here it is more a matter of certain conclusions rather than of first principles. Such metaphysics Lonergan sees as arising from Cognitional Theory, Epistemology – and hence Metaphysics. He describes the three stages by three different questions. 1.) What do I do when I know? 2.) Why is doing that knowing? and 3.) What do I know when I do it?
He describes ‘Cognitional Theory’ as phenomenology, and so as a sort of description of what goes on, a description which is innocent of ‘epistemology’ and ‘metaphysics’, and so prepares the way all the more convincingly for these later achievements. Cognitional theory then is descriptive. All the data are given directly in consciousness. There are ‘states’ and ‘processions’, or for Thomistic ‘processions’ read ‘operations’. A state exists, but there is an incompletion about it, an emotional drive about it, which leads to an operation, and so a new state of consciousness.
Galileo, playing with his new telescope, looks at the moon and sees a pattern to each of the marks on it. Seeing is a state, seeing a pattern gives rise to a question, why are they similar? The question is an operation, it sets him thinking, where have I seen that pattern before? Thinking is not a matter of just looking but working with imagination. They could be volcanoes, they could be craters. His insight is one thing, and it is a further operation to express this insight, to put it into concepts and words. With the theory formulated, he looks through the telescope again. A further question is under way . . . does the data confirm my idea of craters? It does? Absolutely or very probably. A new conclusion is being born. Something similar happened with Archimedes as he played with a rubber duck in his bath and thought about King Hiero’s crown.
Cognitional theory thus gives states which emerge from the first state, sensation. The next state is a theory. the next state is the formulation of the theory. the next state is the assessment of the truth of the theory so formulated against the evidence which is re-examined. There are four states then, and three operations. The operations are wondering, moving to an expression and moving to a conclusion.
Cognitional theory involves personal work, thinking about ones own questions, theories and conclusions. I find humdrum things like bank accounts useful for one has a lively question! Every life moves between questions and answers. How is Freddy doing at school? Why was Mrs de Zuluetta not at church today? Cognitional theory is a matter of being able to recognise this happening again and again.
Epistemology builds upon the base of cognitional theory and asks ‘Why is doing that knowing?’ ‘Doing that’ is more than ‘taking a look’, for there is an interior build up of hypothesis, expression, conclusion, and of course, though I did not express it above, expression of conclusion. One might think knowing is really just taking a look or hearing about looks which other people have taken, for example in Australia. The world to be known is the world we see. But cognitional theory gives us things we can’t see, like the stirring in the mind of Galileo. Many philosophies, though, innocent of cognitional theory tend to the idea that knowing is just about seeing ‘the already out there now real world’.
Idealist philosophy takes the realm of theory as its object and somehow loses touch with ‘the real world’, so one can say that Kant lost the world in his sturdy. Cognitional theory though shows questions arising from the concrete and theory coming to answer questions about whatever, including the already, out there, now, real world.
When a whole lot of asteroids hit the moon, the moon did not know what was happening. the asteroids though left clues in the form of craters and so Galileo came up with a theory first, but the theory was so good that he came up with a conclusion that the theory was true. The conclusion is consciously in the mind of Galileo, but what has come to be known also lies beyond his mind. Asteroids did hit the moon in times past, and now it is also true that the fact has come to be known by the mind of man. Let us remind ourselves again, such advances have dates. If there is a metaphysics of physical facts there is also a metaphysics of meaning.
Metaphysics answers the question, ‘What do I know?’, and also of course, since each of us is very finite on history’s stage, ‘What do we know?’ Metaphysics deals with judgements which are sure and so irreversible. It may be helpful to note that in Christology, Lonergan, facing the Christ of History, Christ of Faith problem bases Christology on the claim, in New Testament document upon New Testament document, that Christ is ‘the Son of God’. From the faith of the early Church he is concerned to find a starting point which scholarship cannot overthrow. So there are various facts of history – William the Conqueror, Galileo and his telescope – which are simply known. They happened. So because of the war I do not recall meeting my father, but from countless evidences, I know he was my father. This is a more down to earth metaphysics than that which says correctly ‘out of nothing, nothing comes’.
It is true of course that much science and much history is hypothetical, so that Newton has somewhat given way to Einstein. I think though it is worth noting ‘irreversibles’, points where a true judgement has been made. So the world is much older than the Biblical account suggests. There are those who suggest that God could have created fossils etc. just to test the faith of his people. Alongside the fact that he is truthful, he shows himself on our side. I take the world of nature and its evidences as a created word of God, alongside the inspired world of God that is Sacred Scripture.
There are moments when ‘sciences’ arrive on the scene. So around 1230 Philip the Chancellor distinguished grace and nature, intellect and faith. For physics there is Newton; Chemistry, Mendeleef; Biology, Darwin; Psychology, Freud; History, Boeckh; and maybe for Economics, Lonergan, with his realisation that ‘the crossovers must equal. For philosophy too it is Lonergan who has completed the Copernican turn to the subject inadequately inaugurated by Descartes and by Kant. For Lonergan shows the subject as capable of affirmation of things human and divine and so capable of metaphysics and response to revealed religion.
Within each subject there are things which come to be known, things which are, even probabilities which are. With such affirmations man transcends himself in the sense he no longer lives simply in an animal habitat but in a universe which is known in some measure, and through history in increasing measure. Does anyone doubt Harvey’s circulation of the blood?
I think metaphysics could become a more popular term, for we are all metaphysical. There can be poor metaphysics and excellent metaphysics. the latter brings the human subject into the picture, whether it is Heraclitus pondering on conversation, the word, or Galileo looking at sunspots or Lonergan helping man to raise to something understood the operations and states we all experience but usually fail to bother to notice or understand.
Lonergan says something similar about evolution, ‘It is only the cause of the whole universe that from lower species can bring about the emergence of successive higher species.’ (Third Collection, 24) I don’t know what Hawkins would make of that – the point thought would remain that to prove God’s existence this way you would have to prove the evolution of species. One recalls the teaching of Vatican One that from created things, God’s existence could be proved. It did not say it had been proved.
Such a high level of metaphysics fulfils Aristotle’s claim that we know when we now the cause. Put simply, we know when we can say ‘because’. The metaphysics that emerges would apply to any created universe. It is interesting that the Greeks so far as I know did not hold the idea of nothingness and creation very clearly. There was a tendency to think of the material order as eternal and the divine was at work helping the philosopher in his work. The idea of nothingness, creation and God comes from the faith perspective. False Gods are ‘not things’. Augustine (d. 430) is already clear. The matter is declared solemnly at the 4th Lateran Council (1215) ‘God made all things visible and invisible out of nothing’.
One realises, with a certain shock, that the ability to say ‘out of nothing, nothing comes’ could not have been said by the Jahwist theologian who composed Genesis II at the time of King Solomon. God fashioned everything. Bara, the word for creation, came from fashioning a quill pen. Our power of conception and expression is historically conditioned. We get enlightened by a genuine movement forward, Cardinal Newman’s ‘Development of Doctrine’. I think here it is helpful to recall Lonergan’s position that ideas have dates and history can be scientifically ordered. So, after the Lateran Council we find Aquinas making a clear distinction between essence and existence, things possible and things actual.
It remains that metaphysics belongs to this world as well as any possible world. Here it is more a matter of certain conclusions rather than of first principles. Such metaphysics Lonergan sees as arising from Cognitional Theory, Epistemology – and hence Metaphysics. He describes the three stages by three different questions. 1.) What do I do when I know? 2.) Why is doing that knowing? and 3.) What do I know when I do it?
He describes ‘Cognitional Theory’ as phenomenology, and so as a sort of description of what goes on, a description which is innocent of ‘epistemology’ and ‘metaphysics’, and so prepares the way all the more convincingly for these later achievements. Cognitional theory then is descriptive. All the data are given directly in consciousness. There are ‘states’ and ‘processions’, or for Thomistic ‘processions’ read ‘operations’. A state exists, but there is an incompletion about it, an emotional drive about it, which leads to an operation, and so a new state of consciousness.
Galileo, playing with his new telescope, looks at the moon and sees a pattern to each of the marks on it. Seeing is a state, seeing a pattern gives rise to a question, why are they similar? The question is an operation, it sets him thinking, where have I seen that pattern before? Thinking is not a matter of just looking but working with imagination. They could be volcanoes, they could be craters. His insight is one thing, and it is a further operation to express this insight, to put it into concepts and words. With the theory formulated, he looks through the telescope again. A further question is under way . . . does the data confirm my idea of craters? It does? Absolutely or very probably. A new conclusion is being born. Something similar happened with Archimedes as he played with a rubber duck in his bath and thought about King Hiero’s crown.
Cognitional theory thus gives states which emerge from the first state, sensation. The next state is a theory. the next state is the formulation of the theory. the next state is the assessment of the truth of the theory so formulated against the evidence which is re-examined. There are four states then, and three operations. The operations are wondering, moving to an expression and moving to a conclusion.
Cognitional theory involves personal work, thinking about ones own questions, theories and conclusions. I find humdrum things like bank accounts useful for one has a lively question! Every life moves between questions and answers. How is Freddy doing at school? Why was Mrs de Zuluetta not at church today? Cognitional theory is a matter of being able to recognise this happening again and again.
Epistemology builds upon the base of cognitional theory and asks ‘Why is doing that knowing?’ ‘Doing that’ is more than ‘taking a look’, for there is an interior build up of hypothesis, expression, conclusion, and of course, though I did not express it above, expression of conclusion. One might think knowing is really just taking a look or hearing about looks which other people have taken, for example in Australia. The world to be known is the world we see. But cognitional theory gives us things we can’t see, like the stirring in the mind of Galileo. Many philosophies, though, innocent of cognitional theory tend to the idea that knowing is just about seeing ‘the already out there now real world’.
Idealist philosophy takes the realm of theory as its object and somehow loses touch with ‘the real world’, so one can say that Kant lost the world in his sturdy. Cognitional theory though shows questions arising from the concrete and theory coming to answer questions about whatever, including the already, out there, now, real world.
When a whole lot of asteroids hit the moon, the moon did not know what was happening. the asteroids though left clues in the form of craters and so Galileo came up with a theory first, but the theory was so good that he came up with a conclusion that the theory was true. The conclusion is consciously in the mind of Galileo, but what has come to be known also lies beyond his mind. Asteroids did hit the moon in times past, and now it is also true that the fact has come to be known by the mind of man. Let us remind ourselves again, such advances have dates. If there is a metaphysics of physical facts there is also a metaphysics of meaning.
Metaphysics answers the question, ‘What do I know?’, and also of course, since each of us is very finite on history’s stage, ‘What do we know?’ Metaphysics deals with judgements which are sure and so irreversible. It may be helpful to note that in Christology, Lonergan, facing the Christ of History, Christ of Faith problem bases Christology on the claim, in New Testament document upon New Testament document, that Christ is ‘the Son of God’. From the faith of the early Church he is concerned to find a starting point which scholarship cannot overthrow. So there are various facts of history – William the Conqueror, Galileo and his telescope – which are simply known. They happened. So because of the war I do not recall meeting my father, but from countless evidences, I know he was my father. This is a more down to earth metaphysics than that which says correctly ‘out of nothing, nothing comes’.
It is true of course that much science and much history is hypothetical, so that Newton has somewhat given way to Einstein. I think though it is worth noting ‘irreversibles’, points where a true judgement has been made. So the world is much older than the Biblical account suggests. There are those who suggest that God could have created fossils etc. just to test the faith of his people. Alongside the fact that he is truthful, he shows himself on our side. I take the world of nature and its evidences as a created word of God, alongside the inspired world of God that is Sacred Scripture.
There are moments when ‘sciences’ arrive on the scene. So around 1230 Philip the Chancellor distinguished grace and nature, intellect and faith. For physics there is Newton; Chemistry, Mendeleef; Biology, Darwin; Psychology, Freud; History, Boeckh; and maybe for Economics, Lonergan, with his realisation that ‘the crossovers must equal. For philosophy too it is Lonergan who has completed the Copernican turn to the subject inadequately inaugurated by Descartes and by Kant. For Lonergan shows the subject as capable of affirmation of things human and divine and so capable of metaphysics and response to revealed religion.
Within each subject there are things which come to be known, things which are, even probabilities which are. With such affirmations man transcends himself in the sense he no longer lives simply in an animal habitat but in a universe which is known in some measure, and through history in increasing measure. Does anyone doubt Harvey’s circulation of the blood?
I think metaphysics could become a more popular term, for we are all metaphysical. There can be poor metaphysics and excellent metaphysics. the latter brings the human subject into the picture, whether it is Heraclitus pondering on conversation, the word, or Galileo looking at sunspots or Lonergan helping man to raise to something understood the operations and states we all experience but usually fail to bother to notice or understand.
Wednesday 3 December 2008
Economic Supplement 6
An Advantage of the Credit Crunch
Until just recently it was possible to go down from Baliol or some such place, take a seat behind a computer, follow an elementary mathematical intelligence and go home with £300,000 a year and the prospect of bonuses. The life-style that emerged required continuing lavish support so the person was trapped. Hubris lead to nemesis. There are counsellors to help those who find life meaningless because they have achieved all their ambitions. The counsellors are employed of course to keep the poor saps working.
The credit crunch will mean it is not so easy to find a job and so one has to think about the matter. To be a slave of course is not to have a choice and the need for a wage for many has meant working down the mines or in the fields for a pittance.
Lonergan describes work in the economy as that by which man raises the potencies of nature to a standard of living, a flow of goods and services for households.
By work other things are done, households are made into homes, religious services are provided. Work has not only the potencies of nature to work upon but also, as it were, the potencies of grace.
A great theologian would point out that grace is always in act and the potencies are in the human side. There are though those created graces alongside supernatural graces. There is the humanity of the missionary. I love the story of the nun in near despair about Aids in Africa, who asked the children why they still believed in God after their parents had been taken from them. They replied, ‘Then God sent you to us.’ Her vocation was considerably strengthened.
W.S. Jevons humorously described religion as the ultimate trade in invisibles, but I think, though there is obviously an economic aspect, for churches must be built, it is good to recognise in the Church a motivation which is not economic, ‘a vocation’.
We pray ‘Send forth your Spirit and the face of the world will be renewed.’ We can see in the world’s troubles failures lay and clerical, so that hearts have failed to entwine, as Daniel O’Connell put it. May the credit crunch lead to much more ‘thinking things through’ so that there may be a greater flow of divine ‘services and goods’.
More prosaically we should work to encourage the young about their options. I have been talking to a 15 year old whose vocational aspiration is to be a hairdresser. Now I have nothing against hairdressers if they manage to tidy me up and leave my locks almost as flowing as when I went in. They deserve a tip. My psychology retains equipoise. It is important work they do. When though I suggested the young lady might be a nurse, she was taken by the idea, but explained she could never get the qualifications needed. I asked a senior parishioner, a nurse, what these might be. She said maths (so you could give correct dosages) and biology (so you had some idea of what was going on). So I have urged the young lady to attend to maths and biology. Could anything be better than a good nurse as you face vital problems?
I notice that qualifications have entered upon the scenario of religious life. Everyone must have A Levels to be a nun. Such religious orders may be missing out on a richer future.
Until just recently it was possible to go down from Baliol or some such place, take a seat behind a computer, follow an elementary mathematical intelligence and go home with £300,000 a year and the prospect of bonuses. The life-style that emerged required continuing lavish support so the person was trapped. Hubris lead to nemesis. There are counsellors to help those who find life meaningless because they have achieved all their ambitions. The counsellors are employed of course to keep the poor saps working.
The credit crunch will mean it is not so easy to find a job and so one has to think about the matter. To be a slave of course is not to have a choice and the need for a wage for many has meant working down the mines or in the fields for a pittance.
Lonergan describes work in the economy as that by which man raises the potencies of nature to a standard of living, a flow of goods and services for households.
By work other things are done, households are made into homes, religious services are provided. Work has not only the potencies of nature to work upon but also, as it were, the potencies of grace.
A great theologian would point out that grace is always in act and the potencies are in the human side. There are though those created graces alongside supernatural graces. There is the humanity of the missionary. I love the story of the nun in near despair about Aids in Africa, who asked the children why they still believed in God after their parents had been taken from them. They replied, ‘Then God sent you to us.’ Her vocation was considerably strengthened.
W.S. Jevons humorously described religion as the ultimate trade in invisibles, but I think, though there is obviously an economic aspect, for churches must be built, it is good to recognise in the Church a motivation which is not economic, ‘a vocation’.
We pray ‘Send forth your Spirit and the face of the world will be renewed.’ We can see in the world’s troubles failures lay and clerical, so that hearts have failed to entwine, as Daniel O’Connell put it. May the credit crunch lead to much more ‘thinking things through’ so that there may be a greater flow of divine ‘services and goods’.
More prosaically we should work to encourage the young about their options. I have been talking to a 15 year old whose vocational aspiration is to be a hairdresser. Now I have nothing against hairdressers if they manage to tidy me up and leave my locks almost as flowing as when I went in. They deserve a tip. My psychology retains equipoise. It is important work they do. When though I suggested the young lady might be a nurse, she was taken by the idea, but explained she could never get the qualifications needed. I asked a senior parishioner, a nurse, what these might be. She said maths (so you could give correct dosages) and biology (so you had some idea of what was going on). So I have urged the young lady to attend to maths and biology. Could anything be better than a good nurse as you face vital problems?
I notice that qualifications have entered upon the scenario of religious life. Everyone must have A Levels to be a nun. Such religious orders may be missing out on a richer future.
The Polyphony of Consciousness
Religious experience is a normal part of the polyphony of consciousness, even though it is not a natural but a supernatural element.
Mounier said man is naturally artificial. One could echo that by saying man is normally religious. So, little children from any background can be helped to pray. It is also true of course that in a very secular culture the average person may have repressed the religious element in life, a repression they could be brought to talk about, something they ‘register’.
Religious consciousness is an element of conscious experience which along with other experiences forms the substructure of our human being. Substructural elements can give rise to a superstructure where what is experienced is also named and placed in the horizon of what a person knows, in the sense of being able to talk about the matter. So one first experiences and then comes to name the colour blue.
If one can talk about something there can be development in the way of understanding and intentionality. To describe something as substructural is not to disparage it. In the religious experience there is direct access to God who is love, and there is no more important reality for man.
It is through the power of naming things and through discourse, through the word in that sense, that we can consider things, draw on our human traditions, criticise our personal conduct, and declare the truth. ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one God’ is a declaration in language calling everyone to reassess their priorities. It is through such words at the level of superstructure at the level of culture that people learn they should be converted. Something they have been neglecting, something they have forgotten about, something even they have repressed belongs to them in a sense, and is what is most important.
Lonergan uses the word luminous, light bearing, and I think we can take it that he is referring to something within consciousness itself. At a substructural level there are many elements. I am aware that it is a wet day and conscious that my options are thereby limited. I am aware of a pile of papers and conscious that I have things I must deal with. I am aware of divine office to be said and conscious I must fit it in before the end of the day. I am aware that my diary is free and conscious perhaps of a slight disappointment that the wide world does not need me today. I am using ‘awareness’ and ‘consciousness’ as a sort of duo. My being is being in the world and of that I am aware as a starter. From that my consciousness takes shape. Lonergan has being aware that the window is open and being conscious that I am about to sneeze. Consciousness is the interior state. This is the inner room where I may enter and realise that beyond windows open, beyond piles of paper, beyond the state of the weather, God is present and God is all.
I am playing around with the terms awareness and consciousness, for our being is being in the world of which we are aware and our consciousness has the power to shift us to new realms of conscious awareness. Our conscious awareness is not only of the already out there now but it can become of the already out there now then. Lonergan has made us conscious and aware of the transforming power a question can have upon consciousness and how through memory, through attention to new data, how through the formation of schematic images insights may arise which intimate the possibility of a new grasp on reality. Our movement forward is not merely contemplative.
Contemplation though is truly luminous in that our consciousness becomes aware of reality in the light of understanding. So great an achievement is this that for centuries this was conceived as the goal and so the luminousness sought was the mind in possession of the truth which lay beyond it and in that light, going beyond all creatures, one could and one can find God in the cloud of unknowing. From such awareness came the vast achievement of monastic life, from say 450AD to 1450AD.
Of course to achieve contemplative awareness requires considerable effort, and so the monks built everything around that goal, with personal silence and with readings secular and religious. Almost without realising it, the monks by their evangelisation and agriculture were changing the world.
What makes the modern world modern is the awareness that man has the power to develop things. St Ignatius of Loyola wrote, ‘When you pray, pray as if it all depends on God. When you work, work as if it all depends on you’. What makes the modern world so futile is the introduction of individualism into the scenario, so that unless we are coerced by needed wages or enticed by bonuses we do not know the secret of collaboration with others in obedience and friendship. There has been a crisis in the Congo at the time of writing. I was very proud to be able to take a second collection for the people there using the agency of CAFOD. Such a capacity though belongs to the parish precisely because it is got together.
Luminosity belongs not just to contemplation but to constructive action. Action can be carried out and seen by others. It involves a certain self forgetting and the finding of a new self. The letting go of self forgetting can help one overcome bad habits.
The priest or extraordinary minister who takes the Blessed Sacrament to the sick tries to recollect what he or she is doing. Action though is demanding of our whole attention. So St Ignatius said, ‘when you work, work as if it all depends on you’. We need though to bring love to our work or it will be loveless. Perhaps we can reverse St Augustine’s ‘when you love look to the source of your love and you will find God’, so that we may say ‘bring the love of God into your work so that in all your encounters you show appropriate loving affection’. This perhaps is what Our Lord means when he would have us ‘dressed for action’ or when he says that not only will we be in him, but he will be in us.
Mounier said man is naturally artificial. One could echo that by saying man is normally religious. So, little children from any background can be helped to pray. It is also true of course that in a very secular culture the average person may have repressed the religious element in life, a repression they could be brought to talk about, something they ‘register’.
Religious consciousness is an element of conscious experience which along with other experiences forms the substructure of our human being. Substructural elements can give rise to a superstructure where what is experienced is also named and placed in the horizon of what a person knows, in the sense of being able to talk about the matter. So one first experiences and then comes to name the colour blue.
If one can talk about something there can be development in the way of understanding and intentionality. To describe something as substructural is not to disparage it. In the religious experience there is direct access to God who is love, and there is no more important reality for man.
It is through the power of naming things and through discourse, through the word in that sense, that we can consider things, draw on our human traditions, criticise our personal conduct, and declare the truth. ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one God’ is a declaration in language calling everyone to reassess their priorities. It is through such words at the level of superstructure at the level of culture that people learn they should be converted. Something they have been neglecting, something they have forgotten about, something even they have repressed belongs to them in a sense, and is what is most important.
Lonergan uses the word luminous, light bearing, and I think we can take it that he is referring to something within consciousness itself. At a substructural level there are many elements. I am aware that it is a wet day and conscious that my options are thereby limited. I am aware of a pile of papers and conscious that I have things I must deal with. I am aware of divine office to be said and conscious I must fit it in before the end of the day. I am aware that my diary is free and conscious perhaps of a slight disappointment that the wide world does not need me today. I am using ‘awareness’ and ‘consciousness’ as a sort of duo. My being is being in the world and of that I am aware as a starter. From that my consciousness takes shape. Lonergan has being aware that the window is open and being conscious that I am about to sneeze. Consciousness is the interior state. This is the inner room where I may enter and realise that beyond windows open, beyond piles of paper, beyond the state of the weather, God is present and God is all.
I am playing around with the terms awareness and consciousness, for our being is being in the world of which we are aware and our consciousness has the power to shift us to new realms of conscious awareness. Our conscious awareness is not only of the already out there now but it can become of the already out there now then. Lonergan has made us conscious and aware of the transforming power a question can have upon consciousness and how through memory, through attention to new data, how through the formation of schematic images insights may arise which intimate the possibility of a new grasp on reality. Our movement forward is not merely contemplative.
Contemplation though is truly luminous in that our consciousness becomes aware of reality in the light of understanding. So great an achievement is this that for centuries this was conceived as the goal and so the luminousness sought was the mind in possession of the truth which lay beyond it and in that light, going beyond all creatures, one could and one can find God in the cloud of unknowing. From such awareness came the vast achievement of monastic life, from say 450AD to 1450AD.
Of course to achieve contemplative awareness requires considerable effort, and so the monks built everything around that goal, with personal silence and with readings secular and religious. Almost without realising it, the monks by their evangelisation and agriculture were changing the world.
What makes the modern world modern is the awareness that man has the power to develop things. St Ignatius of Loyola wrote, ‘When you pray, pray as if it all depends on God. When you work, work as if it all depends on you’. What makes the modern world so futile is the introduction of individualism into the scenario, so that unless we are coerced by needed wages or enticed by bonuses we do not know the secret of collaboration with others in obedience and friendship. There has been a crisis in the Congo at the time of writing. I was very proud to be able to take a second collection for the people there using the agency of CAFOD. Such a capacity though belongs to the parish precisely because it is got together.
Luminosity belongs not just to contemplation but to constructive action. Action can be carried out and seen by others. It involves a certain self forgetting and the finding of a new self. The letting go of self forgetting can help one overcome bad habits.
The priest or extraordinary minister who takes the Blessed Sacrament to the sick tries to recollect what he or she is doing. Action though is demanding of our whole attention. So St Ignatius said, ‘when you work, work as if it all depends on you’. We need though to bring love to our work or it will be loveless. Perhaps we can reverse St Augustine’s ‘when you love look to the source of your love and you will find God’, so that we may say ‘bring the love of God into your work so that in all your encounters you show appropriate loving affection’. This perhaps is what Our Lord means when he would have us ‘dressed for action’ or when he says that not only will we be in him, but he will be in us.
Sunday 30 November 2008
Economic Supplement 5
Ways of Dealing with a Slump
‘Precepts that are not technically specific turn out to be quite ineffectual’ (Christian Duquoc). It is the genius of Catholicism to have, over the centuries, wrought technically specific precepts regarding religion and also to have combined a merciful set of dispensations when the technically specific is too demanding. So there is a technically specific law that Catholics should marry Catholics. One notes that the frequency and reliability of dispensations can undermine the law.
I was wondering what might be ‘technically specific’ precepts for dealing with a slump, and I suggest one might be, ‘if possible maintain your reasonable standard of living’. I do not mean ‘go into unsupportable debt and rely on the State to maintain your reasonable standard of living’. If you can transfer your debt to the debt of the State, the world is getting more heavily into debt.’
What I am trying to express is that if consumer demand is the engine of the economy, then if you are in a position to exercise it in a reasonable way, continue to do so. The position reminds me of Bishop Grant who said – he was a founder of CAFOD – ‘Whatever you do for Lent, don’t give up chocolate – you will ruin Ghana’! It is part of my life to go across to the Chinese restaurant which is struggling. I could imagine, because there is a slump, it would be a virtue to cook for my guests. But, if I have the finances, by going across to the Chinese I am helping them to survive. This in a humble way is an instance of ‘Le Bon Sens’, the sense of the Common Good, ‘Common Sense’ in an uncommon degree, ‘collective responsibility’.
On the radio, the correspondent found hermself the only guest in a 5 star hotel in Pakistan. The staff were so delighted, they ran around her. They hoped, against bazookas falling, that guests would return. May it be. Sic. Amen
‘Precepts that are not technically specific turn out to be quite ineffectual’ (Christian Duquoc). It is the genius of Catholicism to have, over the centuries, wrought technically specific precepts regarding religion and also to have combined a merciful set of dispensations when the technically specific is too demanding. So there is a technically specific law that Catholics should marry Catholics. One notes that the frequency and reliability of dispensations can undermine the law.
I was wondering what might be ‘technically specific’ precepts for dealing with a slump, and I suggest one might be, ‘if possible maintain your reasonable standard of living’. I do not mean ‘go into unsupportable debt and rely on the State to maintain your reasonable standard of living’. If you can transfer your debt to the debt of the State, the world is getting more heavily into debt.’
What I am trying to express is that if consumer demand is the engine of the economy, then if you are in a position to exercise it in a reasonable way, continue to do so. The position reminds me of Bishop Grant who said – he was a founder of CAFOD – ‘Whatever you do for Lent, don’t give up chocolate – you will ruin Ghana’! It is part of my life to go across to the Chinese restaurant which is struggling. I could imagine, because there is a slump, it would be a virtue to cook for my guests. But, if I have the finances, by going across to the Chinese I am helping them to survive. This in a humble way is an instance of ‘Le Bon Sens’, the sense of the Common Good, ‘Common Sense’ in an uncommon degree, ‘collective responsibility’.
On the radio, the correspondent found hermself the only guest in a 5 star hotel in Pakistan. The staff were so delighted, they ran around her. They hoped, against bazookas falling, that guests would return. May it be. Sic. Amen
The Scale of Value and Human Intentionality
The scale of values is an ascending theme as notes on a piano – so there are values vital, social, cultural, personal and religious – but the structure achieved in a mature and holy person rests on the lowest level, on vital values, for as human beings we need to be alive for starters.
The scale of values as expounded by Lonergan and Doran is intimately connected to the scale of intentional consciousness as expounded by Lonergan. So we have sense experience, and alongside the data of sense, the data of consciousness. Correspondingly there is the level of vital values, such as the excellence of a cup of coffee, or, in the desert, a glass of water. Vital values include conscious spontaneity towards others and so perhaps a primordial sense of human unity, for as Pope Paul VI taught ‘God made man to be brothers not enemies’. There can be disorder in our spontaneity, dramatic bias, and the recognition that the censor can be worked upon to be constructive rather than repressive in Doran’s ‘psychological conversion’. Vital values include also the wider ecology, for example, problems arising from sun-spots, CO2 emissions and climate change or a disease affecting the world bee population which is essential for fertilising crops. Health problems have to do with vital values. Starvation, floods, earthquakes have to do with vital values.
One can see that vital values in their entirety compose a colossal agenda, with the health of the world on one side and the health of man including his basic psychic health on the other. As an agenda though, human intentionality must get involved. We witness other levels of value. For example it may be out of religious values that some people busy themselves heroically helping lepers.
One might suggest that higher levels of value, as they emerge, have nothing to do but sort out disorders at the vital level. Where disorder is as it were disorder made visible then the good works can be seen and all will praise the Father in Heaven. As we ascend the scale of values we find ‘disvalues’, disorder at a higher level, so here too good works are to be done. Indeed it is at the highest level of religious values that we find the disorder which is sin. It remains true though that disorders at the natural level of vital values show up human failure at the higher levels.
Ascending from vital values are social values. Social values move from inter-subjective organisation in families and friendships to rationally (or irrationally) organised entities whereby man’s capacity to transform the potencies of nature into a standard of living is organised. This level of operation corresponds to man’s intelligence rather than his rationality, to the understanding which believes what it is taught rather than to the level which asks ‘is it so?’ We learn by trusting others. So in our present society some people believe you ought to get married and some people believe marriage is only an unnecessary bit of paper.
As growing up and maturing in a society we trust others in learning a language, in learning to read, in learning what is good conduct and what is not, and on the whole we can make our way and even pass exams without asking deeper questions. We have to learn that the term ‘water’ applies to that wet stuff. We do not ask ‘why’ we use the term ‘water’, or why there are 26 letters in the alphabet. We accept the truths we are taught or how shall we get started? The social world I am presenting is full of affirmations and intelligibilities – you need petrol for the car – and the affirmations are based on unquestioning trust. Because our ancestors got it right we may hope to get it right. Of course at this level of simply operating intelligence you deal with cultural, personal and religious values. One goes to church with everyone else perhaps but does not think about the matter too much. As I am describing the level of social meanings and values, I think one can recognise Cardinal Newman’s ‘notional assent.’
The society we belong to has the task of seeing that vital values are somehow attended to for all and that the ecology is reasonably cared for. The society though may be biased in some way so that for example slaves don’t matter. The society is guided by higher values and disvalues, religious, personal and cultural.
Cultural values correspond with the level of consciousness described by Lonergan as ‘rational’. This level of consciousness belonged to Aquinas who described it in terms of ‘possible intellect’. Aquinas in turn was influenced by Augustine who recognised that our task was to recognise the truth. At the Council of Nicaea it was not claimed you could imagine the Son as equal to the Father as Tertullian tried to do and failed; or that you could understand the matter perfectly, as Origen might have tried to think; rather the matter was declared to be true, and to deny it merited an anathema. With divine matters we are saying Amen and then, with St Anselm and with Vatican One seeking deeper understanding reverently, diligently and piously. Rational consciousness though recognises the truth of other matters which are proportionate to the human intellect.
The matter is really important because philosophers have not understood the matter. So Lonergan could write ‘There is no modern philosopher who could say Amen’. If the Church were to attempt to base herself on such modern philosophy the faith would be disastrously undermined, for our faithful assents depend upon natural assents. Do we not see the result in a widespread way in current lapsation?
I will give two examples. In both cases, to make a judgement depends on evidence, but for some sorts of judgements the evidence may be very simple. I get a bank statement. The account seems low. The incomes are there, but what is this expenditure for £450? Of course, I had my car serviced and repaired. I accept the bank statement as true.
The President of the Royal College for Science declares that the world is warming because of CO2 emissions. Aquinas said the argument from authority is the weakest of arguments – so, what is the evidence? Some people think the problem might be to do with sunspots. I find I am not in a position to simply assent. I might agree that as a cautionary measure certain things should be done – the Amazon allowed to grow for example – but I would be distressed at cautionary measures which removed food from the tables of the poor. I find I am not in a muddle but in a state of having questions unanswered. I do not know what the case is.
The cultural level deals with what is and what is not the case, and so informs or possibly misinforms the social level of values. So for example if at the cultural level the philosophers fail to notice that it is possible to reach a conclusion, then it will be hard to argue that people ought to get married, for that is a sort of conclusion. Weakness at the cultural level will lead to a drift at the social level. That is our situation today and if we live by notional assents alone we will be adrift with the society.
Lonergan’s fourth level has to do with deliberation and decision and it gives rise to an area for personal values. The level follows on being alive, being socialised and having some level of understanding. Personal values entail knowing when one knows and knowing when one has a question. One has to decide about oneself as well as about other people. Should I eat so much? What shall I wear? How should I develop my understanding about climate change? Do I need to work on the censor which disallows certain images and affects so that I overcome a block in myself? Personal values inform cultural values in the sense that if I know I can know and know I can decide freely then certain cultural positions cannot stand, for example, human beings should be ruled by the stick and the carrot.
Personal values show up a problem of intentionality. We do not always carry out our good resolutions. We need help ‘from above’. We genuinely look for love, to receive, to give. I think one can claim that all human cultures witness to holiness, but such witness is not problem free. Can one identify holiness with the gift of God’s love in other world religions? I think that is Lonergan’s position. Love leads to family life and I think one should add in friendship. Lonergan refers to friendship in his essay on marriage, quoting the Greeks to the effect that friendship normally requires high virtue, but in marriage so much is going for the couple that all you need is decency and then you get friendship. I guess today that we are coming to realise that a reasonable level of virtue is required for marriage. One must though recognise that marriage is a help for ordinary people and in the Catholic world a help to holiness. There is then ‘love for the community’ witnessed to by soldiers but also for all of us as we give our assent to legitimate authority.
The three loves, religious, intimate and social witness to something more than sheer rationality and intentionality about man. Where one such love is at work the others are probably there too. Lonergan at the end of his life speaks very simply of ‘affective conversion’ and of how we become a part of something greater. One recalls St Augustine’s words: ‘When you love, look to the source of your love and you will find God.’
The scale of values as expounded by Lonergan and Doran is intimately connected to the scale of intentional consciousness as expounded by Lonergan. So we have sense experience, and alongside the data of sense, the data of consciousness. Correspondingly there is the level of vital values, such as the excellence of a cup of coffee, or, in the desert, a glass of water. Vital values include conscious spontaneity towards others and so perhaps a primordial sense of human unity, for as Pope Paul VI taught ‘God made man to be brothers not enemies’. There can be disorder in our spontaneity, dramatic bias, and the recognition that the censor can be worked upon to be constructive rather than repressive in Doran’s ‘psychological conversion’. Vital values include also the wider ecology, for example, problems arising from sun-spots, CO2 emissions and climate change or a disease affecting the world bee population which is essential for fertilising crops. Health problems have to do with vital values. Starvation, floods, earthquakes have to do with vital values.
One can see that vital values in their entirety compose a colossal agenda, with the health of the world on one side and the health of man including his basic psychic health on the other. As an agenda though, human intentionality must get involved. We witness other levels of value. For example it may be out of religious values that some people busy themselves heroically helping lepers.
One might suggest that higher levels of value, as they emerge, have nothing to do but sort out disorders at the vital level. Where disorder is as it were disorder made visible then the good works can be seen and all will praise the Father in Heaven. As we ascend the scale of values we find ‘disvalues’, disorder at a higher level, so here too good works are to be done. Indeed it is at the highest level of religious values that we find the disorder which is sin. It remains true though that disorders at the natural level of vital values show up human failure at the higher levels.
Ascending from vital values are social values. Social values move from inter-subjective organisation in families and friendships to rationally (or irrationally) organised entities whereby man’s capacity to transform the potencies of nature into a standard of living is organised. This level of operation corresponds to man’s intelligence rather than his rationality, to the understanding which believes what it is taught rather than to the level which asks ‘is it so?’ We learn by trusting others. So in our present society some people believe you ought to get married and some people believe marriage is only an unnecessary bit of paper.
As growing up and maturing in a society we trust others in learning a language, in learning to read, in learning what is good conduct and what is not, and on the whole we can make our way and even pass exams without asking deeper questions. We have to learn that the term ‘water’ applies to that wet stuff. We do not ask ‘why’ we use the term ‘water’, or why there are 26 letters in the alphabet. We accept the truths we are taught or how shall we get started? The social world I am presenting is full of affirmations and intelligibilities – you need petrol for the car – and the affirmations are based on unquestioning trust. Because our ancestors got it right we may hope to get it right. Of course at this level of simply operating intelligence you deal with cultural, personal and religious values. One goes to church with everyone else perhaps but does not think about the matter too much. As I am describing the level of social meanings and values, I think one can recognise Cardinal Newman’s ‘notional assent.’
The society we belong to has the task of seeing that vital values are somehow attended to for all and that the ecology is reasonably cared for. The society though may be biased in some way so that for example slaves don’t matter. The society is guided by higher values and disvalues, religious, personal and cultural.
Cultural values correspond with the level of consciousness described by Lonergan as ‘rational’. This level of consciousness belonged to Aquinas who described it in terms of ‘possible intellect’. Aquinas in turn was influenced by Augustine who recognised that our task was to recognise the truth. At the Council of Nicaea it was not claimed you could imagine the Son as equal to the Father as Tertullian tried to do and failed; or that you could understand the matter perfectly, as Origen might have tried to think; rather the matter was declared to be true, and to deny it merited an anathema. With divine matters we are saying Amen and then, with St Anselm and with Vatican One seeking deeper understanding reverently, diligently and piously. Rational consciousness though recognises the truth of other matters which are proportionate to the human intellect.
The matter is really important because philosophers have not understood the matter. So Lonergan could write ‘There is no modern philosopher who could say Amen’. If the Church were to attempt to base herself on such modern philosophy the faith would be disastrously undermined, for our faithful assents depend upon natural assents. Do we not see the result in a widespread way in current lapsation?
I will give two examples. In both cases, to make a judgement depends on evidence, but for some sorts of judgements the evidence may be very simple. I get a bank statement. The account seems low. The incomes are there, but what is this expenditure for £450? Of course, I had my car serviced and repaired. I accept the bank statement as true.
The President of the Royal College for Science declares that the world is warming because of CO2 emissions. Aquinas said the argument from authority is the weakest of arguments – so, what is the evidence? Some people think the problem might be to do with sunspots. I find I am not in a position to simply assent. I might agree that as a cautionary measure certain things should be done – the Amazon allowed to grow for example – but I would be distressed at cautionary measures which removed food from the tables of the poor. I find I am not in a muddle but in a state of having questions unanswered. I do not know what the case is.
The cultural level deals with what is and what is not the case, and so informs or possibly misinforms the social level of values. So for example if at the cultural level the philosophers fail to notice that it is possible to reach a conclusion, then it will be hard to argue that people ought to get married, for that is a sort of conclusion. Weakness at the cultural level will lead to a drift at the social level. That is our situation today and if we live by notional assents alone we will be adrift with the society.
Lonergan’s fourth level has to do with deliberation and decision and it gives rise to an area for personal values. The level follows on being alive, being socialised and having some level of understanding. Personal values entail knowing when one knows and knowing when one has a question. One has to decide about oneself as well as about other people. Should I eat so much? What shall I wear? How should I develop my understanding about climate change? Do I need to work on the censor which disallows certain images and affects so that I overcome a block in myself? Personal values inform cultural values in the sense that if I know I can know and know I can decide freely then certain cultural positions cannot stand, for example, human beings should be ruled by the stick and the carrot.
Personal values show up a problem of intentionality. We do not always carry out our good resolutions. We need help ‘from above’. We genuinely look for love, to receive, to give. I think one can claim that all human cultures witness to holiness, but such witness is not problem free. Can one identify holiness with the gift of God’s love in other world religions? I think that is Lonergan’s position. Love leads to family life and I think one should add in friendship. Lonergan refers to friendship in his essay on marriage, quoting the Greeks to the effect that friendship normally requires high virtue, but in marriage so much is going for the couple that all you need is decency and then you get friendship. I guess today that we are coming to realise that a reasonable level of virtue is required for marriage. One must though recognise that marriage is a help for ordinary people and in the Catholic world a help to holiness. There is then ‘love for the community’ witnessed to by soldiers but also for all of us as we give our assent to legitimate authority.
The three loves, religious, intimate and social witness to something more than sheer rationality and intentionality about man. Where one such love is at work the others are probably there too. Lonergan at the end of his life speaks very simply of ‘affective conversion’ and of how we become a part of something greater. One recalls St Augustine’s words: ‘When you love, look to the source of your love and you will find God.’
Monday 17 November 2008
Economic Supplement 4
In the 1960’s, around the name Schumaker, there was concern for an intermediate technology to help the Third World develop. With plentiful labour forks might be better than tractors, especially as tractors need skilled repair. A slogan was ‘small is beautiful’.
At the same time, in the advanced world, the thing was ‘economies of scale’ augmented by technical progress. In those days if the battery in the car went flat you could crank it by hand. Now technical progress has made it inconceivable that the battery goes flat . . . so if it does, (when it does!) cranking is not a solution.
With modern technology most managers have the job of hoping it will work and calling on the experts if it does not. The chap working in the shop can’t do much if the credit card machine breaks down.
Lonergan sees that our technology needs to be efficient so that the world’s teeming millions are fed, but he also sees that there is a problem if our personal capacity is not developed. The Popes make the same point.
I suspect that technology around consumption again could be simplified. I recall a post war wireless which clearly indicated where you turned the dial to get the Light Service or the Third Service. To day I find myself pressing buttons in a random way and occasionally coming up with what I am looking for.
Today in the Chilterns one sees occasionally shepherdless sheep, the odd cow, a stray tractor – what one does not see is any degree of labour intensive agriculture. The fewness of farm workers makes for a lonely life I suspect. In the shops our food comes from the ends of the earth, is very wonderful (I am grateful) and costs a good deal.
I find myself wondering whether there is not scope for an intermediate technology here which involves man more in the way of labour which develops skills and adapts intelligently to problems.
I look after a small vineyard with 400 vines. There is a slow process of coming to understand the vine and the branches – grapes never grow from the main stem. There is the challenge of not using insecticide but keeping the vineyard clear of weeds – a challenge which meets my declining energy levels. There is, occasionally, the undeserved excellence of a good bottle of wine. I am developing and at times failing adequately to develop an intermediate technology. I find there is nothing I do, beyond disturbing about one mouse’s nest a year, that disrupts the ecology. I am free to combine prayer with labour. The task of regular physical labour is a matter of personal discipline and also, I think, understanding oneself.
In vineyards and in moving to intermediate technology – festina lente!
At the same time, in the advanced world, the thing was ‘economies of scale’ augmented by technical progress. In those days if the battery in the car went flat you could crank it by hand. Now technical progress has made it inconceivable that the battery goes flat . . . so if it does, (when it does!) cranking is not a solution.
With modern technology most managers have the job of hoping it will work and calling on the experts if it does not. The chap working in the shop can’t do much if the credit card machine breaks down.
Lonergan sees that our technology needs to be efficient so that the world’s teeming millions are fed, but he also sees that there is a problem if our personal capacity is not developed. The Popes make the same point.
I suspect that technology around consumption again could be simplified. I recall a post war wireless which clearly indicated where you turned the dial to get the Light Service or the Third Service. To day I find myself pressing buttons in a random way and occasionally coming up with what I am looking for.
Today in the Chilterns one sees occasionally shepherdless sheep, the odd cow, a stray tractor – what one does not see is any degree of labour intensive agriculture. The fewness of farm workers makes for a lonely life I suspect. In the shops our food comes from the ends of the earth, is very wonderful (I am grateful) and costs a good deal.
I find myself wondering whether there is not scope for an intermediate technology here which involves man more in the way of labour which develops skills and adapts intelligently to problems.
I look after a small vineyard with 400 vines. There is a slow process of coming to understand the vine and the branches – grapes never grow from the main stem. There is the challenge of not using insecticide but keeping the vineyard clear of weeds – a challenge which meets my declining energy levels. There is, occasionally, the undeserved excellence of a good bottle of wine. I am developing and at times failing adequately to develop an intermediate technology. I find there is nothing I do, beyond disturbing about one mouse’s nest a year, that disrupts the ecology. I am free to combine prayer with labour. The task of regular physical labour is a matter of personal discipline and also, I think, understanding oneself.
In vineyards and in moving to intermediate technology – festina lente!
Commitment
While no one wishes to be a drifter most of the troubles in the world come from people who are committed, but there is something wrong with their commitment. There are those who make a fortune but lack honesty, those who advance in politics but lack humanity. There are norms which are disregarded or only partially regarded – attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, responsibility – and authenticity is demanding for it is a cumulative product. A block of some sort, a bias provides an emerging problem which is consistently ignored.
A community is defined not so much by a boundary as by a common consent to a common policy. So Lonergan having explored individual authenticity explores how this can be widened to understand community. A community requires a common field of experience or people get out of touch. The common field of experience is not just looking at the same landscape with its sunrise and sunset, or all looking at a hole in the road. It includes too the products that previous intelligence has formed which stock the libraries and the internet. It means access to the achievements of the past as well as the instrumentality for contemporary communication. Without education a new generation is like a barbarian host invading.
A community is marked by common and complimentary ways of understanding people and things. A community depends on a common sense to understand the same language or to understand the problems it faces. The plumber has a complimentary and needed understanding but I think one can recognise in the term ‘complimentary’ also those differentiations of consciousness that have arisen through the use of intelligence in the course of history, the theological (the scholastic achievement), the scientific, meaning the empirical sciences in their on-going achievement, the historical, with its reconstruction of the achievement of the human spirit in the way of meanings and values and the modern philosophical differentiation of consciousness.
Plato, horrified that the Polis could have put to death Socrates, thought the solution was a philosopher king. Meantime the Academy was a refuge for virtue. In the idea that community needs complimentary understanding one gains anew the vital importance of philosophy to help such understanding to operate in humble mode with regard to ‘the community’.
This applies to theologians of course. There is the humorous remark to the effect that one can negotiate with a terrorist but not a liturgist. There is though the Reformation which certainly divided the community of Europe and which could be seen as a reaction to the expertise of scholasticism with regard to things natural and divine. There seemed no room for new questions. Communication of discovery got reduced to authoritative utterances from on high. There was a crude protest.
The scientific world with Galileo and Newton and, it was thought, the discovery of the mathematical rules which governed material movement, has created and is creating a new sort of divsion in society between those who are guided by natural and religious values and those who are guided by natural values alone. We face anew abortion, euthanasia, and logically the systematic destruction of the unfit. I realise I have a chance of martyrdom.
The historical differentiation of consciousness which gives us a far greater access to the past has led, is leading, will lead to a new ground of atheism and division under that clam that everything produced by man is human, and since it is human it cannot be divine. The inspiration of the Scriptures, the divine guidance of the Church, though they can be recognised as beliefs affecting and explaining conduct must be dismissed. History must not only be value free but obviously free from influence from God. I merely counter with the wise words of Bishop Grant of Northampton: ‘Where the divine meets the human you get mystery’. An assertion without reason can be met by an assertion.
In the making of community where there is meeting of complementary and common understandings the task of philosophy is huge and vital. Following Vatican II, theology must concern itself also with communications and learn from their results. Modern science must move forward but realise its method does not deal with God. Modern history cannot fail to deal with beliefs in God but can shift from being ‘value free’ to being simply objective about such beliefs. They are operative and account for conduct foul and fair. Lonergan presents the needed stance: we need ‘such self awareness, such self understanding, such self knowledge as to grasp the similarities and differences of common sense, science and history, to grasp the foundations of these three in interiority which also founds natural right, and beyond all knowledge of knowledge to give also knowledge of affectivity in its threefold manifestation of love in the family, loyalty in the community and faith in God.’ (3rd Collection, 179)
Lonergan, in discussing community, moves from common understanding to common judgements, and if we do not possess these, we live in different worlds. Lonergan writes: ‘Philosophical differences affect the very meaning of meaning. Ethical differences effect all evaluations. Religious differences affect the meaning and value of ones world.’ (3rd Collection, 156) We find ourselves living in a world where the only common ground would appear to be the Gross Domestic Product –and of course, the weather. If we are speaking of our national community there has been a slippage, from one religion to several, from several to tolerance, to an enlightenment which asserts reason and denies tradition and so religion, to the rule of interests and the triumph of the democratic interest. If it were always true that ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’ then all would be well of course. The people need to be raised up by wonderful pastoral work for such to be the case. Such a prospect, while it is far from attained, at least presents a way forward, even if initially it must be an ecumenical and multi-faith way forward. Who cannot be touched by the fact that owing to an alliance between the Catholics and Presbyterians in Northern Ireland it is not possible for Westminster to promote abortion in that province? They may dislike each other and from time to time slaughter each other but to their everlasting credit they agree on this most important point, and around it ‘they live in the same world’.
To live in the same world allows support for the same policy and a common consent, a common commitment. The basis of such common consent could be ‘the scale of values’, religious, personal, cultural, social and vital but there is a tendency to a general decline as common sense deals with problems. It is obvious for example that chaos and rioting should be prevented.
With a general decline presenting the easy option one sees why Lonergan claims that it is easier to finds a good man than a good society. If a person can overcome inauthenticity in the tradition which has nurtured him and in himself then such an achievement is an invitation to others.
There are degrees of self transcendence. There is a sensitive self transcendence in enjoying a cup of coffee. Intellectual self transcendence moves to being, to understanding and stating what is, even if, in the natural sciences, such a statement might be, ’This is the best theory we have so far’. Moral self transcendence moves to decision which affects self, others and the world around. There is then self transcendence in love, for God, for neighbour and for intimacy in friendship and family life. Such love brings engagement with the whole scale of values.
The remarkable feature of such loving engagement is that it arrests decline, not in a general sense but in a milieu which is personal and may be more. For example, there were several great monks at Downside when I know it, including such as Hubert van Zeller whose writings reached many. The monasteries were dissolved unworthily, the fact is recorded. They had no mechanism to deal with excessive accumulation of land. Nothing though can deny that today, with wise and faithful monks, the tradition is as alive as it can be. The hermeneutic of retrieval follows the hermeneutic of suspicion, and the achievement belongs to greater matters, even unto the Paschal Mystery.
We find in spiritual matters the story is one of achievement, decline, redemption through authentic self transcendence. Redemption does not take us back to the same starting point but a new starting point maybe surrounded by the consequences of decline, and therefore with new creative and healing work to be done. The fields have been blown by the storms of history but they are still white for the harvest. The temple can never equate in glory to the physical structure put up by Solomon but is one thereby impoverished to have the stone rejected by the builders which is the cornerstone of something much more marvellous and reaching to the ends of the earth?
A community is defined not so much by a boundary as by a common consent to a common policy. So Lonergan having explored individual authenticity explores how this can be widened to understand community. A community requires a common field of experience or people get out of touch. The common field of experience is not just looking at the same landscape with its sunrise and sunset, or all looking at a hole in the road. It includes too the products that previous intelligence has formed which stock the libraries and the internet. It means access to the achievements of the past as well as the instrumentality for contemporary communication. Without education a new generation is like a barbarian host invading.
A community is marked by common and complimentary ways of understanding people and things. A community depends on a common sense to understand the same language or to understand the problems it faces. The plumber has a complimentary and needed understanding but I think one can recognise in the term ‘complimentary’ also those differentiations of consciousness that have arisen through the use of intelligence in the course of history, the theological (the scholastic achievement), the scientific, meaning the empirical sciences in their on-going achievement, the historical, with its reconstruction of the achievement of the human spirit in the way of meanings and values and the modern philosophical differentiation of consciousness.
Plato, horrified that the Polis could have put to death Socrates, thought the solution was a philosopher king. Meantime the Academy was a refuge for virtue. In the idea that community needs complimentary understanding one gains anew the vital importance of philosophy to help such understanding to operate in humble mode with regard to ‘the community’.
This applies to theologians of course. There is the humorous remark to the effect that one can negotiate with a terrorist but not a liturgist. There is though the Reformation which certainly divided the community of Europe and which could be seen as a reaction to the expertise of scholasticism with regard to things natural and divine. There seemed no room for new questions. Communication of discovery got reduced to authoritative utterances from on high. There was a crude protest.
The scientific world with Galileo and Newton and, it was thought, the discovery of the mathematical rules which governed material movement, has created and is creating a new sort of divsion in society between those who are guided by natural and religious values and those who are guided by natural values alone. We face anew abortion, euthanasia, and logically the systematic destruction of the unfit. I realise I have a chance of martyrdom.
The historical differentiation of consciousness which gives us a far greater access to the past has led, is leading, will lead to a new ground of atheism and division under that clam that everything produced by man is human, and since it is human it cannot be divine. The inspiration of the Scriptures, the divine guidance of the Church, though they can be recognised as beliefs affecting and explaining conduct must be dismissed. History must not only be value free but obviously free from influence from God. I merely counter with the wise words of Bishop Grant of Northampton: ‘Where the divine meets the human you get mystery’. An assertion without reason can be met by an assertion.
In the making of community where there is meeting of complementary and common understandings the task of philosophy is huge and vital. Following Vatican II, theology must concern itself also with communications and learn from their results. Modern science must move forward but realise its method does not deal with God. Modern history cannot fail to deal with beliefs in God but can shift from being ‘value free’ to being simply objective about such beliefs. They are operative and account for conduct foul and fair. Lonergan presents the needed stance: we need ‘such self awareness, such self understanding, such self knowledge as to grasp the similarities and differences of common sense, science and history, to grasp the foundations of these three in interiority which also founds natural right, and beyond all knowledge of knowledge to give also knowledge of affectivity in its threefold manifestation of love in the family, loyalty in the community and faith in God.’ (3rd Collection, 179)
Lonergan, in discussing community, moves from common understanding to common judgements, and if we do not possess these, we live in different worlds. Lonergan writes: ‘Philosophical differences affect the very meaning of meaning. Ethical differences effect all evaluations. Religious differences affect the meaning and value of ones world.’ (3rd Collection, 156) We find ourselves living in a world where the only common ground would appear to be the Gross Domestic Product –and of course, the weather. If we are speaking of our national community there has been a slippage, from one religion to several, from several to tolerance, to an enlightenment which asserts reason and denies tradition and so religion, to the rule of interests and the triumph of the democratic interest. If it were always true that ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’ then all would be well of course. The people need to be raised up by wonderful pastoral work for such to be the case. Such a prospect, while it is far from attained, at least presents a way forward, even if initially it must be an ecumenical and multi-faith way forward. Who cannot be touched by the fact that owing to an alliance between the Catholics and Presbyterians in Northern Ireland it is not possible for Westminster to promote abortion in that province? They may dislike each other and from time to time slaughter each other but to their everlasting credit they agree on this most important point, and around it ‘they live in the same world’.
To live in the same world allows support for the same policy and a common consent, a common commitment. The basis of such common consent could be ‘the scale of values’, religious, personal, cultural, social and vital but there is a tendency to a general decline as common sense deals with problems. It is obvious for example that chaos and rioting should be prevented.
With a general decline presenting the easy option one sees why Lonergan claims that it is easier to finds a good man than a good society. If a person can overcome inauthenticity in the tradition which has nurtured him and in himself then such an achievement is an invitation to others.
There are degrees of self transcendence. There is a sensitive self transcendence in enjoying a cup of coffee. Intellectual self transcendence moves to being, to understanding and stating what is, even if, in the natural sciences, such a statement might be, ’This is the best theory we have so far’. Moral self transcendence moves to decision which affects self, others and the world around. There is then self transcendence in love, for God, for neighbour and for intimacy in friendship and family life. Such love brings engagement with the whole scale of values.
The remarkable feature of such loving engagement is that it arrests decline, not in a general sense but in a milieu which is personal and may be more. For example, there were several great monks at Downside when I know it, including such as Hubert van Zeller whose writings reached many. The monasteries were dissolved unworthily, the fact is recorded. They had no mechanism to deal with excessive accumulation of land. Nothing though can deny that today, with wise and faithful monks, the tradition is as alive as it can be. The hermeneutic of retrieval follows the hermeneutic of suspicion, and the achievement belongs to greater matters, even unto the Paschal Mystery.
We find in spiritual matters the story is one of achievement, decline, redemption through authentic self transcendence. Redemption does not take us back to the same starting point but a new starting point maybe surrounded by the consequences of decline, and therefore with new creative and healing work to be done. The fields have been blown by the storms of history but they are still white for the harvest. The temple can never equate in glory to the physical structure put up by Solomon but is one thereby impoverished to have the stone rejected by the builders which is the cornerstone of something much more marvellous and reaching to the ends of the earth?
Economic Supplement 3
Households
If there is a slump, even as the wishful thinkers would have it, a mini-slump, a recession, the problem in the economy is not a failure in the capacity to supply but a failure in the capacity to demand. It is not that the oil wells have run dry or ship makers are over extended or that General Motors can’t produce any more cars, but rather that the Joneses have decided not to take a holiday this year and the Smiths have stopped eating out. There is a shortage of cash about the person. It is not that Mr Average is losing his house but that, forced by payments made, forced by income levels the careless ésprit is lost. It is not that everyone has become a saver but everyone is seeking to balance the books.
It is important to realise that decisions to restrain consumption are not irrational. They are born from experience. The Jones went to Euroland last year and discovered how expensive everything is. They got a little into debt, but nothing too serious. Now they would like to get a little out of debt. Keynes, who made a bob or two on the Stock Exchange for King’s College, Cambridge used an unfortunate phrase to describe economic motivation: ‘animal spirits’, as if one was dealing with a mass of lemmings. Lonergan proposed rather that people’s past experience gave them grounds for some sort of rational decision. If a share has been going down for a couple of years, this might be time to get out. We read about ‘panic’ in the stock market. Fortunes have nearly halved. But actually most of the stocks being held are being held with the prospect of gain.
Again, one might imagine it is irrational for banks not to lend to each other. From lending to each other they have had bad experiences. Why not let them not lend, if that is what their experience bids? Why pump money into the system so they do lend? It will surely happen that some will see they have some money lying idle overnight, and there is a reliable way of earning a % point by 10 a.m. tomorrow.
If the basic problem in the economy is household demand, then the basic problem is that prices are too high. VAT could be eliminated across Europe. Business tax could be eliminated. People could be taught the nature of the problem: prices need to be reduced, so that households on their incomes can buy.
For Lonergan, the theoretical point is that ‘the crossovers must equal’. If money is raised somehow and pumped into the system all systems might go for a day or two or a year or two, but the disequilibrium will manifest itself again. Policy makers might be proud of their decisiveness and the immediate success of what they have done.
What is to be desired is a situation which allows recurrence. The financial flow to companies is sufficient to keep everyone working. Financial flows to the households (including the finite States) are sufficient to allow next year to be as good as this. If there has been technical progress there might even be an increase in standards.
If there is a slump, even as the wishful thinkers would have it, a mini-slump, a recession, the problem in the economy is not a failure in the capacity to supply but a failure in the capacity to demand. It is not that the oil wells have run dry or ship makers are over extended or that General Motors can’t produce any more cars, but rather that the Joneses have decided not to take a holiday this year and the Smiths have stopped eating out. There is a shortage of cash about the person. It is not that Mr Average is losing his house but that, forced by payments made, forced by income levels the careless ésprit is lost. It is not that everyone has become a saver but everyone is seeking to balance the books.
It is important to realise that decisions to restrain consumption are not irrational. They are born from experience. The Jones went to Euroland last year and discovered how expensive everything is. They got a little into debt, but nothing too serious. Now they would like to get a little out of debt. Keynes, who made a bob or two on the Stock Exchange for King’s College, Cambridge used an unfortunate phrase to describe economic motivation: ‘animal spirits’, as if one was dealing with a mass of lemmings. Lonergan proposed rather that people’s past experience gave them grounds for some sort of rational decision. If a share has been going down for a couple of years, this might be time to get out. We read about ‘panic’ in the stock market. Fortunes have nearly halved. But actually most of the stocks being held are being held with the prospect of gain.
Again, one might imagine it is irrational for banks not to lend to each other. From lending to each other they have had bad experiences. Why not let them not lend, if that is what their experience bids? Why pump money into the system so they do lend? It will surely happen that some will see they have some money lying idle overnight, and there is a reliable way of earning a % point by 10 a.m. tomorrow.
If the basic problem in the economy is household demand, then the basic problem is that prices are too high. VAT could be eliminated across Europe. Business tax could be eliminated. People could be taught the nature of the problem: prices need to be reduced, so that households on their incomes can buy.
For Lonergan, the theoretical point is that ‘the crossovers must equal’. If money is raised somehow and pumped into the system all systems might go for a day or two or a year or two, but the disequilibrium will manifest itself again. Policy makers might be proud of their decisiveness and the immediate success of what they have done.
What is to be desired is a situation which allows recurrence. The financial flow to companies is sufficient to keep everyone working. Financial flows to the households (including the finite States) are sufficient to allow next year to be as good as this. If there has been technical progress there might even be an increase in standards.
Love, Commitment, Values
The scale of values moves from vital to social to cultural to personal to religious. Everything depends on vital values. More particularly, each level of values takes direction from the next higher level and depends immediately on the lower level; so social values are informed by cultural values and dependent on vital values.
Personal values then are informed by religious values and dependent on cultural values. If the culture is simply pragmatic and hedonistic basing itself on the already out there now real world given us by scientific discovery, then personal and religious values can hardly emerge. What one is and what one is to be is already told to one by a set of experts and their conclusions.
Without genuine personal values religious values cannot emerge, so it is helpful to recognise the danger to man posed by a sheerly scientific culture which guides politics and the mass media and leads to sex education for five year olds. I always think the best sex education for five year olds involves couples who fall in love and ‘live happily ever after’!
The situation is poor not only for five year olds but for Man and the Church in her post Vatican Two stance where she relies on modern culture. The question, how the culture is to be upgraded is therefore of great importance.
If we envisage the solution as arising from the scientific world, the way forward is to point out that the scientific spirit itself as exemplified by Galileo, Newton and countless others is not simply a matter of observations and experiments but a matter of curiosity driving the one who makes the observations and conducts the experiments. Here is something of importance which needs to be explained and which cannot be explained and explored by scientific method.
We have, in moving to the question about curiosity moved into the level of personal values and conscious states which involve more than curiosity alone. I recall a man going in for an operation who said ‘I realise I am a bundle of atoms and yet I still feel anxious.’ Alongside being curious about curiosity we can be curious about ‘anxiety’. We are moving into a world which, as well as being aware of the data of sense brought to a high point in observation and experiment, is also aware of the data of consciousness.
One person cannot be conscious for another and so coming to apprehend and understand the data of consciousness has to be an individual, personal affair, but books can be written and persons can become expert to help others. So, alongside scientific achievement, the achievements of ‘self appropriation’ can get themselves published and so enter the level of cultural values. So one can be greatly helped by purchasing Lonergan’s Third Collection and reading it. Just as the scientist or historian belongs to a community of others who are similarly minded, so there is a widespread community of those who are concerned for spiritual values and a somewhat smaller community of those who are prepared to be absolutely accurate about what they say. Lonergan suggests we might become as familiar with the attainment of knowing as we are with the attainment of seeing by opening our eyes in daylight and looking.
Of course we are conscious of sensation, and it is not without sensation that we are awake. It is not without sensation that we get curious or find ourselves in a position to reach a conclusion. So the task of self appropriation does not go on outside the world we have come to know, and if that world has an expertise one has the advantage of being able to refer to that. We are each though the expert in our own life with its achievements and follies, with communications and breakdowns, with loves and maybe hatreds, with its religious moments or maybe moment when God is quite out of the picture or we act to keep him out of the picture. Self appropriation is concerned with how we bring ourselves to bear on the world we gradually come to know and love, in which we decide and act.
When we consider the data of consciousness abstracted from the data of experience we are therefore being highly abstract. There are two streams in the data of consciousness to be distinguished, or let us be bold and say three. The three are emotions, images and intentionality. Emotions and images proceed from the psyche and at first play a subordinate role. Without emotion we would not be stirred to understand something or delighted when we succeeded. Our actions very often proceed from the emotion of sympathy or fellow feeling. We need the work of imagination to form the schematic image needed for understanding or to prepare a course of action. The psyche then, a source of images and emotions, escorts our intentionality. But at the highest level, the level of love, our emotions appear to take over, so that we have a new basis for intentionality, a new basis for our evaluations.
Intentionality – consciousness moving with a purpose – achieves self transcendence in coming to know. Knowledge is not a matter of looking beyond oneself but a matter of constructing within oneself that which corresponds with what is, whether what one comes to know lies beyond oneself or is part of ones own make up. The idea of self appropriation is in large part the idea that we can come to understand and understand correctly what has long been part of our experience. There is self transcendence in coming to know about oneself because in understanding human nature you also come to understand about others. They too have insights, they too reach firm conclusions.
Lonergan writes (2nd Collection, 1968, p.80) that human consciousness at its fullest emerges when ‘we deliberate, evaluate, decide, act . . . Then the existential subject exists and his character, his personal essence is at stake’. This is the place of merit or sin, where we may win the peace of a clear conscience or the disquiet of guilt. Decisions face the question, is our action worthwhile? They may be purely personal or arrived at together, when hearts entwine and a common action is agreed. A common policy can win the assent of others. I think we can see there is self transcendence in well thought out and well deliberated action, for such action affects the world around, other people, and shapes anew ones own character.
These words were penned about 1968 and it was about then that Lonergan started writing about the central importance of love. In 1977 (3rd Collection, p.174) he writes about questions for intelligibility, questions for factual truth, the question of the good, and then suggests that these questions moving to answers are ‘but aspects of a deeper and more comprehensive principle. . . that begins before consciousness, unfolds through sensitivity, intelligence, rational reflection, responsible deliberation. . . a dynamic state that sublates all that goes before, a principle of movement at once purgative and illuminative and a principle of rest in which union is fulfilled.’. He is writing of love by which we are ‘lifted above ourselves and carried along as parts within an ever more intimate yet ever more liberating dynamic whole’.
The fact that this movement ‘starts before consciousness’ indicates that it is our whole nature that is involved and so why it is that our emotional life is so thoroughly involved.
When he writes that love makes us ‘parts’ helps us realise the importance of ‘commitment’, of being willing to play our part, and throughout a whole future informed by love.
At the level of rationality we are able to place values in a hierarchy, but love makes certain values operative in a new way so one can write of a transvaluation of values. Hence we find celibacy, perpetual virginity, and a new context for reflection about contraception.
Love in the family and in the community witness to the love of God. ‘When you love look to the source of your love and you will find God’. (Augustine)
The person in self appropriation has to appropriate his own physical nature with its neural basis for psychic life, his sensitivity, his intelligence, his rational capacity to reach true conclusions, his responsibility for the use of freedom all in the context of the commitment that love has brought about, the demand that love makes.
When the love of God is acknowledged then the purification which is moral conversion gets under way and intellectual conversion at least makes a start for what is invisible is acknowledged as real. The orientation to love being prior to consciousness means that loving commitment is not just a matter of mind, or even mind and heart – flesh and blood too must be completely engaged.
Personal values then are informed by religious values and dependent on cultural values. If the culture is simply pragmatic and hedonistic basing itself on the already out there now real world given us by scientific discovery, then personal and religious values can hardly emerge. What one is and what one is to be is already told to one by a set of experts and their conclusions.
Without genuine personal values religious values cannot emerge, so it is helpful to recognise the danger to man posed by a sheerly scientific culture which guides politics and the mass media and leads to sex education for five year olds. I always think the best sex education for five year olds involves couples who fall in love and ‘live happily ever after’!
The situation is poor not only for five year olds but for Man and the Church in her post Vatican Two stance where she relies on modern culture. The question, how the culture is to be upgraded is therefore of great importance.
If we envisage the solution as arising from the scientific world, the way forward is to point out that the scientific spirit itself as exemplified by Galileo, Newton and countless others is not simply a matter of observations and experiments but a matter of curiosity driving the one who makes the observations and conducts the experiments. Here is something of importance which needs to be explained and which cannot be explained and explored by scientific method.
We have, in moving to the question about curiosity moved into the level of personal values and conscious states which involve more than curiosity alone. I recall a man going in for an operation who said ‘I realise I am a bundle of atoms and yet I still feel anxious.’ Alongside being curious about curiosity we can be curious about ‘anxiety’. We are moving into a world which, as well as being aware of the data of sense brought to a high point in observation and experiment, is also aware of the data of consciousness.
One person cannot be conscious for another and so coming to apprehend and understand the data of consciousness has to be an individual, personal affair, but books can be written and persons can become expert to help others. So, alongside scientific achievement, the achievements of ‘self appropriation’ can get themselves published and so enter the level of cultural values. So one can be greatly helped by purchasing Lonergan’s Third Collection and reading it. Just as the scientist or historian belongs to a community of others who are similarly minded, so there is a widespread community of those who are concerned for spiritual values and a somewhat smaller community of those who are prepared to be absolutely accurate about what they say. Lonergan suggests we might become as familiar with the attainment of knowing as we are with the attainment of seeing by opening our eyes in daylight and looking.
Of course we are conscious of sensation, and it is not without sensation that we are awake. It is not without sensation that we get curious or find ourselves in a position to reach a conclusion. So the task of self appropriation does not go on outside the world we have come to know, and if that world has an expertise one has the advantage of being able to refer to that. We are each though the expert in our own life with its achievements and follies, with communications and breakdowns, with loves and maybe hatreds, with its religious moments or maybe moment when God is quite out of the picture or we act to keep him out of the picture. Self appropriation is concerned with how we bring ourselves to bear on the world we gradually come to know and love, in which we decide and act.
When we consider the data of consciousness abstracted from the data of experience we are therefore being highly abstract. There are two streams in the data of consciousness to be distinguished, or let us be bold and say three. The three are emotions, images and intentionality. Emotions and images proceed from the psyche and at first play a subordinate role. Without emotion we would not be stirred to understand something or delighted when we succeeded. Our actions very often proceed from the emotion of sympathy or fellow feeling. We need the work of imagination to form the schematic image needed for understanding or to prepare a course of action. The psyche then, a source of images and emotions, escorts our intentionality. But at the highest level, the level of love, our emotions appear to take over, so that we have a new basis for intentionality, a new basis for our evaluations.
Intentionality – consciousness moving with a purpose – achieves self transcendence in coming to know. Knowledge is not a matter of looking beyond oneself but a matter of constructing within oneself that which corresponds with what is, whether what one comes to know lies beyond oneself or is part of ones own make up. The idea of self appropriation is in large part the idea that we can come to understand and understand correctly what has long been part of our experience. There is self transcendence in coming to know about oneself because in understanding human nature you also come to understand about others. They too have insights, they too reach firm conclusions.
Lonergan writes (2nd Collection, 1968, p.80) that human consciousness at its fullest emerges when ‘we deliberate, evaluate, decide, act . . . Then the existential subject exists and his character, his personal essence is at stake’. This is the place of merit or sin, where we may win the peace of a clear conscience or the disquiet of guilt. Decisions face the question, is our action worthwhile? They may be purely personal or arrived at together, when hearts entwine and a common action is agreed. A common policy can win the assent of others. I think we can see there is self transcendence in well thought out and well deliberated action, for such action affects the world around, other people, and shapes anew ones own character.
These words were penned about 1968 and it was about then that Lonergan started writing about the central importance of love. In 1977 (3rd Collection, p.174) he writes about questions for intelligibility, questions for factual truth, the question of the good, and then suggests that these questions moving to answers are ‘but aspects of a deeper and more comprehensive principle. . . that begins before consciousness, unfolds through sensitivity, intelligence, rational reflection, responsible deliberation. . . a dynamic state that sublates all that goes before, a principle of movement at once purgative and illuminative and a principle of rest in which union is fulfilled.’. He is writing of love by which we are ‘lifted above ourselves and carried along as parts within an ever more intimate yet ever more liberating dynamic whole’.
The fact that this movement ‘starts before consciousness’ indicates that it is our whole nature that is involved and so why it is that our emotional life is so thoroughly involved.
When he writes that love makes us ‘parts’ helps us realise the importance of ‘commitment’, of being willing to play our part, and throughout a whole future informed by love.
At the level of rationality we are able to place values in a hierarchy, but love makes certain values operative in a new way so one can write of a transvaluation of values. Hence we find celibacy, perpetual virginity, and a new context for reflection about contraception.
Love in the family and in the community witness to the love of God. ‘When you love look to the source of your love and you will find God’. (Augustine)
The person in self appropriation has to appropriate his own physical nature with its neural basis for psychic life, his sensitivity, his intelligence, his rational capacity to reach true conclusions, his responsibility for the use of freedom all in the context of the commitment that love has brought about, the demand that love makes.
When the love of God is acknowledged then the purification which is moral conversion gets under way and intellectual conversion at least makes a start for what is invisible is acknowledged as real. The orientation to love being prior to consciousness means that loving commitment is not just a matter of mind, or even mind and heart – flesh and blood too must be completely engaged.
Friday 14 November 2008
Economic Supplement 2
Cause of the Slump
In the 1940’s Lonergan, after reading Schumpeter, came to an understanding of the trade cycle which he expressed in two works which are almost impossible to read. His philosophy helped him to identify the purpose of the economy – purchase of goods and services by the consumer. To help analysis I think it is I who have added in the government too as a household of households and also as a consumer. This helps one to the healthy realisation that States too are finite entities, whereas I grew up in a post-war world where it seemed to many the solution of every problem lay with the State.
The economy is an immense worldwide collaboration upon the potentialities of nature to bring about a flow of goods and services which are destined to be purchased. By work man transforms things and gets paid. The money he earns enables him to buy the products of the economy. When he buys, the finance he has earned flows back into the firms, so that they can continue paying workers and others.
There is then a circulation of finance, money coming from households and States to purchase goods and services, and money going from firms to pay or reward or obey households – wages, rents, dividends, taxes.
Lonergan’s main assertion is that ‘the crossovers must equal’. If prices are too high households maintaining their standard of living will go into debt. Via the banking system, firms will be able to supply the cash banks need to lend to households. Such a condition is incapable of recurrence year on year as interest payments mount up.
To illustrate the point I am going to put two situations, one entirely imaginable, one too vast for our imagination, yet understandable.
Henry Ford was asked why he paid his workers so well. He replied, if I don’t, how can they buy my cars? It is a joke of course, but it shows awareness that wages must be sufficient for output to be purchased.
Let us now consider the global economy, all the earners and their households, and the financial flow, as if it were one currency, going to those households. Include all the States as households. That financial flow conditions the possible debt free flow of households to firms in the purchase of goods and services. Here too, the financial crossovers must equal. There must be then a normative mark up on goods and services or the resultant price level will be too high.
In a free world economy what must guide the norms other than informed consciences of producers, who understand that they must cover their costs including costs to repair equipment? If they charge too high a price they are effectively making themselves thieves. They are ruining households and perhaps ruining their own market in the process. The concern for the outcome, the concern for the common good, le bon sens belongs to all participants in the economy.
In boom times, basic commodity prices rise in the markets. Such prices are not fixed by mark ups. The % mark up though will yield a greater return per item. When basic prices fall the amount raised by the same % mark up will fall per item. Revenues though will hold up if sales increase sufficiently. This should be the object of policy and hope in times of recession and slump.
In the 1940’s Lonergan, after reading Schumpeter, came to an understanding of the trade cycle which he expressed in two works which are almost impossible to read. His philosophy helped him to identify the purpose of the economy – purchase of goods and services by the consumer. To help analysis I think it is I who have added in the government too as a household of households and also as a consumer. This helps one to the healthy realisation that States too are finite entities, whereas I grew up in a post-war world where it seemed to many the solution of every problem lay with the State.
The economy is an immense worldwide collaboration upon the potentialities of nature to bring about a flow of goods and services which are destined to be purchased. By work man transforms things and gets paid. The money he earns enables him to buy the products of the economy. When he buys, the finance he has earned flows back into the firms, so that they can continue paying workers and others.
There is then a circulation of finance, money coming from households and States to purchase goods and services, and money going from firms to pay or reward or obey households – wages, rents, dividends, taxes.
Lonergan’s main assertion is that ‘the crossovers must equal’. If prices are too high households maintaining their standard of living will go into debt. Via the banking system, firms will be able to supply the cash banks need to lend to households. Such a condition is incapable of recurrence year on year as interest payments mount up.
To illustrate the point I am going to put two situations, one entirely imaginable, one too vast for our imagination, yet understandable.
Henry Ford was asked why he paid his workers so well. He replied, if I don’t, how can they buy my cars? It is a joke of course, but it shows awareness that wages must be sufficient for output to be purchased.
Let us now consider the global economy, all the earners and their households, and the financial flow, as if it were one currency, going to those households. Include all the States as households. That financial flow conditions the possible debt free flow of households to firms in the purchase of goods and services. Here too, the financial crossovers must equal. There must be then a normative mark up on goods and services or the resultant price level will be too high.
In a free world economy what must guide the norms other than informed consciences of producers, who understand that they must cover their costs including costs to repair equipment? If they charge too high a price they are effectively making themselves thieves. They are ruining households and perhaps ruining their own market in the process. The concern for the outcome, the concern for the common good, le bon sens belongs to all participants in the economy.
In boom times, basic commodity prices rise in the markets. Such prices are not fixed by mark ups. The % mark up though will yield a greater return per item. When basic prices fall the amount raised by the same % mark up will fall per item. Revenues though will hold up if sales increase sufficiently. This should be the object of policy and hope in times of recession and slump.
Horizontal and Vertical Finality
A person living deep inside a tower block might think that everything was a matter of horizontal movement, not realising that great height made part of his position. So age upon age has gone into our making but we might imagine history simply goes back to the Second World War. We are made up from subatomic particles but it might seem that we are simply made up from limbs and organs.
In the world as it is, a horizontal movement has a vertical component, rather as a line has a certain thickness. The vertical component can then lead to new horizontal operations.
It was in thinking about marriage in the 1940s that Lonergan distinguished three horizontal levels which one might describe as the affective, the rational and the holy, together with two vertical finalities.
The basis of marriage is the natural affection which leads to union and offspring. It is this level that distinguishes marriage from any other relationship.
Since man must eat, marriage provides a higher level of operation whereby a living is made and so the children grow up learning from their parents.
In marriage the love is so deep that it tells of God, and so the union leads to the couple helping each other in holy ways and helping the children also to be children of God.
In the case of marriage the higher levels, if they are not wisely informed, can do harm to the foundational level. So the Albigensians were full of the idea of God but, while they may have admitted the idea of a holy friendship, they disdained matter and so the level of attraction, union and offspring.
At the level of rational cooperation, the basic level may be disdained because it presents inconveniences (like babies!) and is so much less important that money careers, social status, insurance, a swimming pool and a privileged education maybe. The basic level, not understood as a gift from God, gets hammered and gradually the idea of marriage gets lost as the purposes of union (to foster faithful love and to have offspring) get lost. Thus our world moves towards serial monogamy, it seems. It should be recalled that a gift from God involves responsibilities to him.
The idea of vertical finality emerging from horizontal finality gave rise to Lonergan’s idea of emergent probability as a cosmological theory. Many acts of love and many responsibilities borne gives rise in marriage to a holy state of love and willingness, so many subatomic particles give rise to the periodic table of Mendeleev.
The emergence of a new order is not predictable from its basic elements and so involves God and his plans. So the many stars emerge and in that multitude the earth arrives circling the sun. It becomes a place of rain, river and sea; a place of rock and sand, the basis for the emergence of life.
Vertical finality is not predictable from the preceding situation. The new form arriving witnesses the hand of God. At the same time, since there is a succession of new situations there is a ‘probability of emergence’, which provides a framework for scientific analysis which attends only to the empirical. What has become clear since the 1950’s, when people realised how important habitat was for different creatures, is that evolution, emergent probability, is not just the arrival of a single new species on the scene, but the arrival of a new set of interdependent species. Ecology follows upon ecology, with strange birds capable of drawing nectar from strange plants.
The present global credit crunch perhaps illustrates the obscurity of vertical finality. While most people are hoping to return to things as they were (including their bad old ways!) the probability is that there needs to be a new emergence. There may I suppose be many false starts. From mistakes something may be learned. Interesting here is Simone Weil’s remark in the 1930’s that with the power of compound interest currencies would need to collapse from time to time.
Emergent finality can be seen in the way different sorts of question emerge from a previous level of question and answer. Grown man has a horizon shaped by his people’s history and has own. There can though be questions for intelligence. Should I buy some new shoes? Can I afford it? What are prices like now? Do I like that fashion? There are then questions for reflection. Are you sure you can afford it given that you have to repair your car? When you can be sure, there is the further question, is it the right thing to do – or would it be better to get my old shoes repaired?
Without questions for intelligence being answered, there is no matter for rational reflection, and without the firm conclusions of rational reflection there can be no deliberation.
Again in history there is a first plateau of practical achievement or the population won’t live long. There is a second plateau of cultural achievement with poetry and play, philosophy and literature, science and history, religion and morals. One learns at school and as much as one needs through life’s experiences. There is then a third plateau when man appropriates himself in the conditions of his own unfolding and development. Of course an individual can do this for himself in certain areas – so Socrates was a great thinker and a brave soldier. Perhaps though we should consider the third plateau as a stage of history conditioned by scholastic theology, the development of modern science, the refinement of historical scholarship and indeed the discernment of objective norms governing authentic subjectivity including affective, moral, intellectual and psychic conversion. Such attainment will be relatively rare, but perhaps across the globe sufficient in number to encourage each other and gradually bring needed enlightenment to the cultural superstructure.
The need for such an attainment is illustrated where the cultural superstructure gets fixated in some limited way and imposes a set of ideas on the multitude which prevent the sort of life which can and should be led. So in Marxism a set of ideas were imposed by Communist governments which disallowed freedom of thought and religion. With Nazism a natural pride in race got elevated into being a dogmatic superiority over all others. It is possible that the scientific differentiation of consciousness is leading to a world view which sees man as just an object among objects, a part of ‘the already out there now real world’ so that man’s spirituality again gets discounted. You might get the Royal College of Science coming out not against ‘Creationism’, whatever that is, but against Creation and against God. The state could imagine it was being up to date and ‘scientific’ in its obliteration of religion. Dawkins and others might approve, but the consequences would be terrible. We saw in the modernist crisis around 1900 that the historical spirit can lead in the same direction.
The third plateau as we are envisaging it is a case of vertical finality emerging from horizontal attainments ongoing in the realms of religion, science and history. It is philosophy working on these attainments and helping experts to remain humble and accurate in their declarations. It would help different experts to cooperate, for example theologians and psychologists or psychologists and sociologists. While we have some knowledge, the third plateau should keep us open and very shy of any false dogmatism. This is not to disparage true dogmas!
In the world as it is, a horizontal movement has a vertical component, rather as a line has a certain thickness. The vertical component can then lead to new horizontal operations.
It was in thinking about marriage in the 1940s that Lonergan distinguished three horizontal levels which one might describe as the affective, the rational and the holy, together with two vertical finalities.
The basis of marriage is the natural affection which leads to union and offspring. It is this level that distinguishes marriage from any other relationship.
Since man must eat, marriage provides a higher level of operation whereby a living is made and so the children grow up learning from their parents.
In marriage the love is so deep that it tells of God, and so the union leads to the couple helping each other in holy ways and helping the children also to be children of God.
In the case of marriage the higher levels, if they are not wisely informed, can do harm to the foundational level. So the Albigensians were full of the idea of God but, while they may have admitted the idea of a holy friendship, they disdained matter and so the level of attraction, union and offspring.
At the level of rational cooperation, the basic level may be disdained because it presents inconveniences (like babies!) and is so much less important that money careers, social status, insurance, a swimming pool and a privileged education maybe. The basic level, not understood as a gift from God, gets hammered and gradually the idea of marriage gets lost as the purposes of union (to foster faithful love and to have offspring) get lost. Thus our world moves towards serial monogamy, it seems. It should be recalled that a gift from God involves responsibilities to him.
The idea of vertical finality emerging from horizontal finality gave rise to Lonergan’s idea of emergent probability as a cosmological theory. Many acts of love and many responsibilities borne gives rise in marriage to a holy state of love and willingness, so many subatomic particles give rise to the periodic table of Mendeleev.
The emergence of a new order is not predictable from its basic elements and so involves God and his plans. So the many stars emerge and in that multitude the earth arrives circling the sun. It becomes a place of rain, river and sea; a place of rock and sand, the basis for the emergence of life.
Vertical finality is not predictable from the preceding situation. The new form arriving witnesses the hand of God. At the same time, since there is a succession of new situations there is a ‘probability of emergence’, which provides a framework for scientific analysis which attends only to the empirical. What has become clear since the 1950’s, when people realised how important habitat was for different creatures, is that evolution, emergent probability, is not just the arrival of a single new species on the scene, but the arrival of a new set of interdependent species. Ecology follows upon ecology, with strange birds capable of drawing nectar from strange plants.
The present global credit crunch perhaps illustrates the obscurity of vertical finality. While most people are hoping to return to things as they were (including their bad old ways!) the probability is that there needs to be a new emergence. There may I suppose be many false starts. From mistakes something may be learned. Interesting here is Simone Weil’s remark in the 1930’s that with the power of compound interest currencies would need to collapse from time to time.
Emergent finality can be seen in the way different sorts of question emerge from a previous level of question and answer. Grown man has a horizon shaped by his people’s history and has own. There can though be questions for intelligence. Should I buy some new shoes? Can I afford it? What are prices like now? Do I like that fashion? There are then questions for reflection. Are you sure you can afford it given that you have to repair your car? When you can be sure, there is the further question, is it the right thing to do – or would it be better to get my old shoes repaired?
Without questions for intelligence being answered, there is no matter for rational reflection, and without the firm conclusions of rational reflection there can be no deliberation.
Again in history there is a first plateau of practical achievement or the population won’t live long. There is a second plateau of cultural achievement with poetry and play, philosophy and literature, science and history, religion and morals. One learns at school and as much as one needs through life’s experiences. There is then a third plateau when man appropriates himself in the conditions of his own unfolding and development. Of course an individual can do this for himself in certain areas – so Socrates was a great thinker and a brave soldier. Perhaps though we should consider the third plateau as a stage of history conditioned by scholastic theology, the development of modern science, the refinement of historical scholarship and indeed the discernment of objective norms governing authentic subjectivity including affective, moral, intellectual and psychic conversion. Such attainment will be relatively rare, but perhaps across the globe sufficient in number to encourage each other and gradually bring needed enlightenment to the cultural superstructure.
The need for such an attainment is illustrated where the cultural superstructure gets fixated in some limited way and imposes a set of ideas on the multitude which prevent the sort of life which can and should be led. So in Marxism a set of ideas were imposed by Communist governments which disallowed freedom of thought and religion. With Nazism a natural pride in race got elevated into being a dogmatic superiority over all others. It is possible that the scientific differentiation of consciousness is leading to a world view which sees man as just an object among objects, a part of ‘the already out there now real world’ so that man’s spirituality again gets discounted. You might get the Royal College of Science coming out not against ‘Creationism’, whatever that is, but against Creation and against God. The state could imagine it was being up to date and ‘scientific’ in its obliteration of religion. Dawkins and others might approve, but the consequences would be terrible. We saw in the modernist crisis around 1900 that the historical spirit can lead in the same direction.
The third plateau as we are envisaging it is a case of vertical finality emerging from horizontal attainments ongoing in the realms of religion, science and history. It is philosophy working on these attainments and helping experts to remain humble and accurate in their declarations. It would help different experts to cooperate, for example theologians and psychologists or psychologists and sociologists. While we have some knowledge, the third plateau should keep us open and very shy of any false dogmatism. This is not to disparage true dogmas!
Economic Supplement 1
Being Technically specific 1. Credit Creation
I suspect that the reason banks are not lending to each other is that they fear a run on the occasion of a loss of confidence and so they would like to have enough liquidity to meet a run. When a bank which had best be nameless refused any communication from another bank looking for $20 billion for a week – the return of a loan, the second bank went bust (Lehmans).
One gets the position of a bank with £x million in deposits and £x million in cash ready at any moment to pay any or all depositors. Such a bank would have to charge a fee for a deposit in order to pay for administration. There would be no scope for ‘bonuses’ since banking initiative would not exist, beyond perhaps opening a new branch or a change in the wallpaper.
In a static situation going from age to age one could imagine such a bank allowing overdrafts to reliable clients, whether households or firms, and so gently augmenting their income. The idea of credit creation and the reality of it belongs to banks.
This way the banks adopt the mantle of the money lender of old. Usury is condemned from ages past. The fact that the poor need loans from time to time has been recognised by the Church for nearly 700 years – also that the administration of such loans requires an administrative charge. To make provision for the poor in this way is helpful, especially if it excludes the rapacious usurer from the scene. Perhaps it was for this reason that a Pope of the nineteenth century, approached by bankers about the difference between usury and interest and the difficulty of making a concrete decision, told the bankers they were not to be troubled.
I suppose there is a difference between providing an overdraft for someone in a temporary disequilibrium arising within a stable situation and lending to those who wish to buy a house because the house prices are rising. The borrower hopes to benefit for with a rising market the change in his house price will purchase his groceries for the week. In seeking to benefit from the borrower’s acumen the banking system is at once promoting and seeking to benefit from an inflationary situation. With a certain objectivity one can say they will get what they deserve when the bubble bursts.
While credit creation is the mechanism whereby house prices have gone up so much in recent years bringing a sense of security to the elderly and providing an impossible challenge to young families who would like to be house owners, it is helpful to notice that credit creation has a vertical finality towards providing finance to support growth in the economy. Such growth may be extensive, greater numbers of people using the same technology and skill, or intensive, through technical progress an improvement in a society’s productivity. Both processes go in Great Britain at present. Here is the locus, in times of normal confidence, for banks to expand credit. If it is a time of a massive new technology being installed the bank’s operation will lead to a rise in prices until the new technology is installed – then, one hopes, to a lowering of prices.
Subsidiarity translates into professional responsibility for a profession such as bankers. Their responsibility is not to finance inflationary movements. A banker said to me his only criterion was whether an operation should make money.
So bankers should not finance booms in houses and they should not finance booms in the stock market. Except in some dire problem like unavoidable warfare they should not finance governments spending more than they raise in taxation.
Of course house boomers, speculators and governments seeking popularity with the multitude can find a way round my stricture. But if those who prove so venal are penalised by other banks they may think twice. Once the currency was protected by a gold standard. We need a new gold standard to be provided by the banking profession in its integrity. Thus the value of a currency will be preserved and genuine economic growth promoted.
I suspect that the reason banks are not lending to each other is that they fear a run on the occasion of a loss of confidence and so they would like to have enough liquidity to meet a run. When a bank which had best be nameless refused any communication from another bank looking for $20 billion for a week – the return of a loan, the second bank went bust (Lehmans).
One gets the position of a bank with £x million in deposits and £x million in cash ready at any moment to pay any or all depositors. Such a bank would have to charge a fee for a deposit in order to pay for administration. There would be no scope for ‘bonuses’ since banking initiative would not exist, beyond perhaps opening a new branch or a change in the wallpaper.
In a static situation going from age to age one could imagine such a bank allowing overdrafts to reliable clients, whether households or firms, and so gently augmenting their income. The idea of credit creation and the reality of it belongs to banks.
This way the banks adopt the mantle of the money lender of old. Usury is condemned from ages past. The fact that the poor need loans from time to time has been recognised by the Church for nearly 700 years – also that the administration of such loans requires an administrative charge. To make provision for the poor in this way is helpful, especially if it excludes the rapacious usurer from the scene. Perhaps it was for this reason that a Pope of the nineteenth century, approached by bankers about the difference between usury and interest and the difficulty of making a concrete decision, told the bankers they were not to be troubled.
I suppose there is a difference between providing an overdraft for someone in a temporary disequilibrium arising within a stable situation and lending to those who wish to buy a house because the house prices are rising. The borrower hopes to benefit for with a rising market the change in his house price will purchase his groceries for the week. In seeking to benefit from the borrower’s acumen the banking system is at once promoting and seeking to benefit from an inflationary situation. With a certain objectivity one can say they will get what they deserve when the bubble bursts.
While credit creation is the mechanism whereby house prices have gone up so much in recent years bringing a sense of security to the elderly and providing an impossible challenge to young families who would like to be house owners, it is helpful to notice that credit creation has a vertical finality towards providing finance to support growth in the economy. Such growth may be extensive, greater numbers of people using the same technology and skill, or intensive, through technical progress an improvement in a society’s productivity. Both processes go in Great Britain at present. Here is the locus, in times of normal confidence, for banks to expand credit. If it is a time of a massive new technology being installed the bank’s operation will lead to a rise in prices until the new technology is installed – then, one hopes, to a lowering of prices.
Subsidiarity translates into professional responsibility for a profession such as bankers. Their responsibility is not to finance inflationary movements. A banker said to me his only criterion was whether an operation should make money.
So bankers should not finance booms in houses and they should not finance booms in the stock market. Except in some dire problem like unavoidable warfare they should not finance governments spending more than they raise in taxation.
Of course house boomers, speculators and governments seeking popularity with the multitude can find a way round my stricture. But if those who prove so venal are penalised by other banks they may think twice. Once the currency was protected by a gold standard. We need a new gold standard to be provided by the banking profession in its integrity. Thus the value of a currency will be preserved and genuine economic growth promoted.
The World Constitutive Function of Meaning
There are different world views, and one might improve the statement by saying different operative world views. I once had a curate who as a boy used to serve Mass in a chapel outside which a Littlewoods sign hung. He formed the view that by divine Providence he was destined to win the pools. Each Saturday evening would find him still disappointed. He would be the first to agree that our operative world views do not always call upon our rational power to recognise baloney. So Fr Lonergan writes ‘the constructions of intelligence without the control of reasonableness yield not philosophy but myth, not science but magic, not astronomy but astrology, not chemistry but alchemy, not history but legend’ and I suppose one might add not religion but superstition.
If meaning operating with a rational control gives us a knowledge of empirical science and history, by the same token it gives us a knowledge of ourselves. Knowledge of the world and of the self advance pari passu.
I came across a physicist who thought there must be a load of parallel universes because the chances were against such a universe as this, showing as it were, design features. I think this theory makes the assumption that because a thing can be thought therefore it must exist. In rational reflection or judgement the truth of some theory is recognised and others are dismissed. The fact that our world shows evidence of design does not mean that therefore there must be millions of universes lacking design just as the fact of Hamlet being written does not mean there have been millions of monkeys playing with typewriters. It was William of Ockham who wrote ‘entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate’ (beings should not be multiplied without necessity).
There is a way of thinking about things which is sensible and rational. The Royal College for Science in insisting on experiment or observation is insisting on the sensible as a basis for judgements which belong to empirical science. But it is not only the world of empirical science which is sensible. The interpersonal world of human relations does not get along without senses operating on such things as smiles and letters.
The scientist operating on billions and billions of parallel universes, while he may know much about the cosmos around, would seem not to have adverted to his own power of rational judgement. The writing of Hamlet is better explained and adequately explained by accepting that William Shakespeare was a brilliant playwright. Alongside billions of atoms the scientist needs to recognise his own mind and how to use it sensibly.
After writing Insight (finished 1954, published 1957) Lonergan became aware of a distinction he had not made which is important. He had a conversation with Fr Coreth, and realised that there is a distinction between real being and notional being. One may or may not prove Pythagoras’ theorem, but the matter is notional. An apple though, manifesting itself through senses, is real. There is a sensible and a notional realm proportionate to man’s intellect. The distinction is so obvious that it is surprising that a book like Insight could be written without making it. The human intellect is like a highly charged snail. It works very thoroughly on what is within its range. It makes an advance in its horizon very slowly. Any advance is very slow for it is through not knowing to knowing, through question to answer and through question which does not have an appropriate heuristic structure set up. So for that scientist, for whom the formation of a notion constitutes reality it will be a gradual affair to gather the fact that it is through human judgement that he recognises reality. The already out there now real world has to recognise also the discriminating power of the human mind. He will need to attend to a different sort of data, namely himself in his conscious operations, he will need to form a hypothesis and verify it.
A point to verify, by way of example, is the proposition that it is foolish to withhold judgement when the evidence is in. I find a pretty persuasive instance is the bank statement when I can recognise all the items of expenditure and income! Or it would be foolish to deny one is cold when the wind bites. It would be foolish to deny the invasion of William the Conqueror, the religious changes brought about by Henry VIII or the industrial revolution. Our world consists of things we experience directly like sunrise or sunset and things we have learned about from others. Indeed without the words ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ we might not consciously advert to something so obvious. The world mediated by language and its meaning is very largely the totality of the world we know. The world of meaning perhaps even shapes the psyche and so the things we might imagine, feel and think about. Meaning expressed helps us to notice the world we already experience. So by expressing the idea of rational reflection which acknowledges truth or probability or falsehood one would help the multi-universe scientist to appropriate a personal activity he is constantly entering upon.
Alongside the meaning which shapes us there is the meaning which we bring to bear upon the world so as to shape its future – our expressions, our aims, our work and our capacity to persevere. Alongside a world of meanings which shape our culture in a general way, there are the meanings which we bring into the world personally, especially through the depth and uniqueness of interpersonal love.
One can talk about the being of meaning and indeed the health of meaning in a particular culture or a particular life. A humanist culture, for example, is not open to the love of God. A depressed person has lost much of the sense of personal meaning. If meaning is constitutive of our world, then there are aberrations of meaning leading to sad worlds for people. When the Word walked among us he restored the full health of meaning by deed as well as word: ‘you will know the truth and the truth will make you free’. All things are made new in the light of God’s meaning.
I would like to return to Fr Coreth’s important distinction between real being and notional being. Real being bears witness to God, for the things which exist need not exist. Their existence therefore bears witness to God ‘who made all things, visible and invisible out of nothing’ (Lateran Council, 1215).
Does notional reality also bear witness to God? Notional reality does not exist without a thinker thinking the thought. Just as the physicist could conceive an infinite number of parallel universes, so we find the human mind is capable of conceiving infinity in perhaps an infinite number of different ways. With notional reality we find the ‘potens omnia facere et fieri’ the power to make and become all things of Aristotle and Aquinas. We find a hint of the truth stated by Augustine, ‘you have made us for yourself dear Lord and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee’. With our capacity to think infinite thoughts can we think the thought of the total of the content of possible notional reality as actual? Snail like in any development we cannot claim to have such a content before our mind’s eye. When we think notionally about Pythagoras or some such are we inventing or discovering? If discovering, then the thing discovered must already be thought and so there must be the original thinker of all possible thought, before whom all possibilities are actual, even creation, the possibility of an actual world with its own autonomies, even the deadly autonomy of sin. Such is God. I am close to St Anselm’s argument, it is greater to be than to be thought. The thinker is more than a set of thoughts. There is an amusing (?) moment when Bertrand Russell in Trinity Street said ‘Heavens, Anselm is right’. He never lost the idea of God but could not himself live in a Godly way.
If meaning operating with a rational control gives us a knowledge of empirical science and history, by the same token it gives us a knowledge of ourselves. Knowledge of the world and of the self advance pari passu.
I came across a physicist who thought there must be a load of parallel universes because the chances were against such a universe as this, showing as it were, design features. I think this theory makes the assumption that because a thing can be thought therefore it must exist. In rational reflection or judgement the truth of some theory is recognised and others are dismissed. The fact that our world shows evidence of design does not mean that therefore there must be millions of universes lacking design just as the fact of Hamlet being written does not mean there have been millions of monkeys playing with typewriters. It was William of Ockham who wrote ‘entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate’ (beings should not be multiplied without necessity).
There is a way of thinking about things which is sensible and rational. The Royal College for Science in insisting on experiment or observation is insisting on the sensible as a basis for judgements which belong to empirical science. But it is not only the world of empirical science which is sensible. The interpersonal world of human relations does not get along without senses operating on such things as smiles and letters.
The scientist operating on billions and billions of parallel universes, while he may know much about the cosmos around, would seem not to have adverted to his own power of rational judgement. The writing of Hamlet is better explained and adequately explained by accepting that William Shakespeare was a brilliant playwright. Alongside billions of atoms the scientist needs to recognise his own mind and how to use it sensibly.
After writing Insight (finished 1954, published 1957) Lonergan became aware of a distinction he had not made which is important. He had a conversation with Fr Coreth, and realised that there is a distinction between real being and notional being. One may or may not prove Pythagoras’ theorem, but the matter is notional. An apple though, manifesting itself through senses, is real. There is a sensible and a notional realm proportionate to man’s intellect. The distinction is so obvious that it is surprising that a book like Insight could be written without making it. The human intellect is like a highly charged snail. It works very thoroughly on what is within its range. It makes an advance in its horizon very slowly. Any advance is very slow for it is through not knowing to knowing, through question to answer and through question which does not have an appropriate heuristic structure set up. So for that scientist, for whom the formation of a notion constitutes reality it will be a gradual affair to gather the fact that it is through human judgement that he recognises reality. The already out there now real world has to recognise also the discriminating power of the human mind. He will need to attend to a different sort of data, namely himself in his conscious operations, he will need to form a hypothesis and verify it.
A point to verify, by way of example, is the proposition that it is foolish to withhold judgement when the evidence is in. I find a pretty persuasive instance is the bank statement when I can recognise all the items of expenditure and income! Or it would be foolish to deny one is cold when the wind bites. It would be foolish to deny the invasion of William the Conqueror, the religious changes brought about by Henry VIII or the industrial revolution. Our world consists of things we experience directly like sunrise or sunset and things we have learned about from others. Indeed without the words ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ we might not consciously advert to something so obvious. The world mediated by language and its meaning is very largely the totality of the world we know. The world of meaning perhaps even shapes the psyche and so the things we might imagine, feel and think about. Meaning expressed helps us to notice the world we already experience. So by expressing the idea of rational reflection which acknowledges truth or probability or falsehood one would help the multi-universe scientist to appropriate a personal activity he is constantly entering upon.
Alongside the meaning which shapes us there is the meaning which we bring to bear upon the world so as to shape its future – our expressions, our aims, our work and our capacity to persevere. Alongside a world of meanings which shape our culture in a general way, there are the meanings which we bring into the world personally, especially through the depth and uniqueness of interpersonal love.
One can talk about the being of meaning and indeed the health of meaning in a particular culture or a particular life. A humanist culture, for example, is not open to the love of God. A depressed person has lost much of the sense of personal meaning. If meaning is constitutive of our world, then there are aberrations of meaning leading to sad worlds for people. When the Word walked among us he restored the full health of meaning by deed as well as word: ‘you will know the truth and the truth will make you free’. All things are made new in the light of God’s meaning.
I would like to return to Fr Coreth’s important distinction between real being and notional being. Real being bears witness to God, for the things which exist need not exist. Their existence therefore bears witness to God ‘who made all things, visible and invisible out of nothing’ (Lateran Council, 1215).
Does notional reality also bear witness to God? Notional reality does not exist without a thinker thinking the thought. Just as the physicist could conceive an infinite number of parallel universes, so we find the human mind is capable of conceiving infinity in perhaps an infinite number of different ways. With notional reality we find the ‘potens omnia facere et fieri’ the power to make and become all things of Aristotle and Aquinas. We find a hint of the truth stated by Augustine, ‘you have made us for yourself dear Lord and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee’. With our capacity to think infinite thoughts can we think the thought of the total of the content of possible notional reality as actual? Snail like in any development we cannot claim to have such a content before our mind’s eye. When we think notionally about Pythagoras or some such are we inventing or discovering? If discovering, then the thing discovered must already be thought and so there must be the original thinker of all possible thought, before whom all possibilities are actual, even creation, the possibility of an actual world with its own autonomies, even the deadly autonomy of sin. Such is God. I am close to St Anselm’s argument, it is greater to be than to be thought. The thinker is more than a set of thoughts. There is an amusing (?) moment when Bertrand Russell in Trinity Street said ‘Heavens, Anselm is right’. He never lost the idea of God but could not himself live in a Godly way.
Friday 17 October 2008
Towards a Personal Philopsophy of Life
If one was becoming a physicist or a historian or a mathematician one would be entering a widespread collaboration and trained to understand certain achievements and perhaps to take them forward. Philosophy at first appears more patchy for it is not as if philosophers all agree. If one holds that there is a perennial philosophy moving through the Greeks, St Justin, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas to modern Thomists, then perhaps one would be surprised to find modern Thomists not agreeing. There was tremendous enthusiasm for Thomism in the 1930’s. After Vatican II it seems to have ebbed away. In 1879, Leo XIII’s encyclical, Aeterni Patris, promoting St Thomas Aquinas was a tremendous rallying cry. I do not have the impression of there being anything equivalent in the post Vatican II world. Perhaps though after Nazism and Communism it is rather a relief to be allowed to think ones own thoughts, even in the face of a mounting secular political correctness.
Fr Lonergan does not see metaphysics as a set of first principles which are evident and which provide a starting point for everyone. He sees metaphysics as an achievement, rather as modern science is an achievement or modern history is an achievement.
He sees the starting point for thought as a direct apprehension of what it is to be human, a phenomenology of our personal experience. Someone said that so and so had decided to accept the world and someone else said ‘gad she’d better’. I think it was Dr Johnson who proved that the world existed by banging the table. Lonergan gets us rather to describe dimensions of our human life and verify certain conclusions in the courtroom of personal experience. He calls this area of thought ‘cognitional theory’.
Our mental life, if we have reached any age is quite shaped up by our family, by what we were taught at school and what we have subsequently learned. No one entering this discourse is a ‘tabula rasa’. We have a language, familiarity with an occupation, papers we read; we have maybe one or two theories; we have maybe certitudes, a religion, duties and loves. One could say all this is purely subjective and that we need a clearer starting point. But Lonergan would claim there are elements of undeniable objectivity to our subjective experience and recognising the norms that bind us and direct us, and which have substantially done so over our lifetime will help us recognise our power to know what lies beyond us and so, in a way which will emerge, to achieve a metaphysic.
Lonergan in his work ‘Insight’ focuses on one aspect of what it is to be human, to have insights of various types. I think it is helpful to many to look at the whole gamut of human experience and to discover a certain objectivity which belongs to our case. We are used to finding a certain sort of objectivity in the already out there now real world making use of experiment, observation and mathematical structures; there is a certain objectivity about historical statements but our heuristic structure will need to be richer than what mathematics can supply if we are to deal with human motivation. Indeed it is likely that a better understanding of the conduct of others will flow from a better understanding of our own minds and hearts.
In physical science there is a flow of data and then a flow of mathematical notions to be verified or falsified by the data. So Newton’s F=MA startled the world with its accuracy and predictive power. So in history there is a flow of data and a hypothetical flow which hopefully is richer than just maths, so that certain positions can be verified, the power for example of the zeitgeist or the spirit of the age.
Our conscious living is similarly a flow and to come up with objective rules about the matter again is a matter of posing a theory and seeing whether or not it is verified. With empirical matters (and consciousness provides a flow of data) scientific status is achieved only by the methodical application of a heuristic structure. The simplest example might have to do with the fact that we all fall asleep and lose consciousness.
Consciousness then can have a zero condition, even though we exist, and are lying abed. One might ask can you prove that you are not conscious in another realm in another way when you are in a deep sleep, in the astral plane say, and the answer is I cannot prove or disprove it from the evidence available to me. I am seeking to account for the conscious flow which I experience.
When we are in the dream state we are not normally responsible for our conduct. It might happen that an angel comes to us and converses with us so that we are able to respond and agree responsibly as is reported to have happened to St Joseph. Presumably, from the standpoint of faith, something similar happens to us when we die. But this is not usually how we experience things. Our supernatural moments if they occur normally occur when we are fully awake. Philip the Chancellor’s distinction between nature and supernature comes to help us in cognitional analysis, the enquiry into the phenomenology of our ordinary consciousness, which phenomenology should include ordinary ways in which we experience the supernatural, if we do.
Ordinarily then the flow of consciousness moves from zero to dream consciousness, where we are not fully present to ourselves in the rich way that belongs to fully conscious experience. The dream of the morning may or may not be analysed as preparation for the day.
We awake into a world of sense experience and a question to be verified or denied is that when we wake into the world of sense experience we wake into the whole world we know. Maybe we wake gradually not sure of where we are, enjoying just animal experience. At some point, we come to into the whole world we know, with its routines, habits, duties, purposes, fears, hopes. We enter upon the stage of history refreshed perhaps by a good night’s sleep. Our world may be just a practical world or our spirit might rise immediately to God in some sort of prayer. Lives are very different. Some people dress with care, others just put on the clothes they threw on the floor the previous night. Conduct differs and underlying values may differ.
A proposition might be: when we apprehend a superior value in the conduct of another we may accept it or reject it. To accept a genuine value gives us the happiness of improving our lives, to reject it leads to rationalisation and a certain unease about our existence. For example, I was astonished to learn that Ghandi spent twenty minutes a day cleaning his teeth. He used to read at the same time. I have felt rebuked. My careless brushing over a life-time has led to countless visits to the dentist. Perhaps in India such visits would be harder and infections more frequent and dangerous. I don’t suppose I should rise to Ghandi’s high standard but I recognise scope for improvement in my life and am glad to do so.
It is the human embodiment of values that improves and challenges us. So we should all pray more, study more, brush our teeth more. Abstract utterances and pious platitudes go over our heads. But Alfred the Great actually attempted to spend one third of his time in prayer (else how should the country be blessed?), one third of his time in study (else how should he be a wise king?), and one third of his time in administration (else how should the Danes be repulsed?). A life well lived by another challenges us. The challenge can exist across time. We have an incipient point for an understanding of the communion of saints. Another proposition then to consider and verify: our understanding can develop, but normally only where there is some understanding to start with.
Fr Lonergan does not see metaphysics as a set of first principles which are evident and which provide a starting point for everyone. He sees metaphysics as an achievement, rather as modern science is an achievement or modern history is an achievement.
He sees the starting point for thought as a direct apprehension of what it is to be human, a phenomenology of our personal experience. Someone said that so and so had decided to accept the world and someone else said ‘gad she’d better’. I think it was Dr Johnson who proved that the world existed by banging the table. Lonergan gets us rather to describe dimensions of our human life and verify certain conclusions in the courtroom of personal experience. He calls this area of thought ‘cognitional theory’.
Our mental life, if we have reached any age is quite shaped up by our family, by what we were taught at school and what we have subsequently learned. No one entering this discourse is a ‘tabula rasa’. We have a language, familiarity with an occupation, papers we read; we have maybe one or two theories; we have maybe certitudes, a religion, duties and loves. One could say all this is purely subjective and that we need a clearer starting point. But Lonergan would claim there are elements of undeniable objectivity to our subjective experience and recognising the norms that bind us and direct us, and which have substantially done so over our lifetime will help us recognise our power to know what lies beyond us and so, in a way which will emerge, to achieve a metaphysic.
Lonergan in his work ‘Insight’ focuses on one aspect of what it is to be human, to have insights of various types. I think it is helpful to many to look at the whole gamut of human experience and to discover a certain objectivity which belongs to our case. We are used to finding a certain sort of objectivity in the already out there now real world making use of experiment, observation and mathematical structures; there is a certain objectivity about historical statements but our heuristic structure will need to be richer than what mathematics can supply if we are to deal with human motivation. Indeed it is likely that a better understanding of the conduct of others will flow from a better understanding of our own minds and hearts.
In physical science there is a flow of data and then a flow of mathematical notions to be verified or falsified by the data. So Newton’s F=MA startled the world with its accuracy and predictive power. So in history there is a flow of data and a hypothetical flow which hopefully is richer than just maths, so that certain positions can be verified, the power for example of the zeitgeist or the spirit of the age.
Our conscious living is similarly a flow and to come up with objective rules about the matter again is a matter of posing a theory and seeing whether or not it is verified. With empirical matters (and consciousness provides a flow of data) scientific status is achieved only by the methodical application of a heuristic structure. The simplest example might have to do with the fact that we all fall asleep and lose consciousness.
Consciousness then can have a zero condition, even though we exist, and are lying abed. One might ask can you prove that you are not conscious in another realm in another way when you are in a deep sleep, in the astral plane say, and the answer is I cannot prove or disprove it from the evidence available to me. I am seeking to account for the conscious flow which I experience.
When we are in the dream state we are not normally responsible for our conduct. It might happen that an angel comes to us and converses with us so that we are able to respond and agree responsibly as is reported to have happened to St Joseph. Presumably, from the standpoint of faith, something similar happens to us when we die. But this is not usually how we experience things. Our supernatural moments if they occur normally occur when we are fully awake. Philip the Chancellor’s distinction between nature and supernature comes to help us in cognitional analysis, the enquiry into the phenomenology of our ordinary consciousness, which phenomenology should include ordinary ways in which we experience the supernatural, if we do.
Ordinarily then the flow of consciousness moves from zero to dream consciousness, where we are not fully present to ourselves in the rich way that belongs to fully conscious experience. The dream of the morning may or may not be analysed as preparation for the day.
We awake into a world of sense experience and a question to be verified or denied is that when we wake into the world of sense experience we wake into the whole world we know. Maybe we wake gradually not sure of where we are, enjoying just animal experience. At some point, we come to into the whole world we know, with its routines, habits, duties, purposes, fears, hopes. We enter upon the stage of history refreshed perhaps by a good night’s sleep. Our world may be just a practical world or our spirit might rise immediately to God in some sort of prayer. Lives are very different. Some people dress with care, others just put on the clothes they threw on the floor the previous night. Conduct differs and underlying values may differ.
A proposition might be: when we apprehend a superior value in the conduct of another we may accept it or reject it. To accept a genuine value gives us the happiness of improving our lives, to reject it leads to rationalisation and a certain unease about our existence. For example, I was astonished to learn that Ghandi spent twenty minutes a day cleaning his teeth. He used to read at the same time. I have felt rebuked. My careless brushing over a life-time has led to countless visits to the dentist. Perhaps in India such visits would be harder and infections more frequent and dangerous. I don’t suppose I should rise to Ghandi’s high standard but I recognise scope for improvement in my life and am glad to do so.
It is the human embodiment of values that improves and challenges us. So we should all pray more, study more, brush our teeth more. Abstract utterances and pious platitudes go over our heads. But Alfred the Great actually attempted to spend one third of his time in prayer (else how should the country be blessed?), one third of his time in study (else how should he be a wise king?), and one third of his time in administration (else how should the Danes be repulsed?). A life well lived by another challenges us. The challenge can exist across time. We have an incipient point for an understanding of the communion of saints. Another proposition then to consider and verify: our understanding can develop, but normally only where there is some understanding to start with.
Wednesday 1 October 2008
Personal Responsibility and Tradition
It is not without effort that we achieve something – we need the help and encouragement of others who have themselves been trained. We learn to drive from those who drive, but a more significant example comes from the Irish. The monks there spoke and wrote better Latin in 700AD than was found in Rome – the Irish, a people who had never even been part of the Roman Empire!
I recall at Oscott in the 1960s a sense of relief that we did not have to deal with Latin. Was not everything translated these days? I recall too a slight sense of surprise and disappointment about the matter. Was I witnessing a sort of decline? Or was it progress for I was training to be a priest in England in the late twentieth century? I would need to be in the same world as the people I was ministering to. The result though is I find myself dealing with a scriptural tradition with just a smattering of Latin, Greek and Hebrew. My Latin has gradually picked up a bit and a few Greek and Hebrew words somehow enter our contemporary Catholic culture. I am somehow aware my formation in the area of languages could be better.
It is worth recalling Lonergan’s words: ‘Excellence in any walk of life is ever a matter of effort, training, education, encouragement, support.’ (3rd Collection, p. 119) Encouragement and support normally come from the older generation though of course they might come as special grace from Heaven. One catches a glimpse here of the fact that teaching is a vocation not a job and that it is the sharing with another of a personal achievement. Where education is going on genuinely there is therefore a special union between teacher and pupil.
Lonergan sees the ground, the starting point of education as affectivity. I rather suspect that often the teacher approaches a difficult situation with a multitude in half rebellion with the idea he must show who is in control! Affectivity is the last thing one demonstrates in an age full of fear about child abuse. Affectivity when the world is starved of it is likely to be misinterpreted. There are those in psychological damage for whom affectivity leads to compulsive conduct. So perhaps the idea needs restoration. Surely it does!
First, parents and mothers particularly are supremely rich in affection to their children. I recall a religious sister, Mother Rosario, at the age of 80 kicking a football with some little children – she had obviously won their hearts. Our Lord, when he first deals with the fishermen invites them to ‘come and see’ where he lived. Did he who after his resurrection cooked them breakfast by the Sea of Galilee take them to some remote cell where he made them some mint tea? He was known as a glutton and a wine bibber, a friend of tax collectors and sinners and about this wining and dining way of life he claims ‘wisdom is justified by her children’. When risen and dumbfounding, he asks for a bit of fish, I think we may envisage he was asking for a meal, and in the course of it he might have asked Peter how his mother’s health was. The art of winning affection and so setting a context for further things to go on would obviously be vital for those in communications, for example those who preach or teach. St Paul urges us to ‘let all people feel your warmth of heart’.
Lonergan has the realm of ‘values’ rising from the world of affection. So the Irish novices learned from older monks the value of Latin, and the children playing football with Sister Rosario picked up in a way the value of being a nun. I was blessing a couple of 3 year olds. One kept attending to her teddy bear. It was explained to me later that she was trying to get the bear to make the Sign of the Cross. She had picked up directly my concern to bless another.
I think we often think that values arise from abstract principles. Kant apparently disparaged emotions when it came to moral principles. There is a difference between those who think that abstract principles are self evident and those who argue that an abstraction flows from an insight, and an insight has emotion about it (Archimedes) as well as a schematic image of some sort.
Lonergan then has beliefs arising on values, including of course the value of believing other people who are creditworthy. Belief allows a division of labour with regard to knowing and so expands enormously the scale of what may be known, whether the matter is secular or religious. While Lonergan has beliefs arising from values one should note that one appropriates many values through belief. Knowledge comes at us in the form of propositions which may be true and certain or which may be opinions or which may be genuine fiction or even a lie, an attempt to deceive. May one see this general making use of belief to communicate all sorts of things as founding Cardinal Newman’s idea of notional assent? So many matters have to be known that not everything can be known with very great clarity and sureness.
It may be thought that what one wants to encourage is individual giftedness even unto genius and that the world of belief is somehow an impediment to this. One wants a historian with bright ideas, but to be a good historian does one not need to apply oneself to the relevant data? Perhaps some educational ideas today derive from the Enlightenment’s stress on Reason and its disparagement of Tradition. Once one realises that most knowledge is transmitted by belief one cannot avoid realising that a belief system is a tradition of some sort, and so even in scientific or historical matters, the Enlightenment position gets radically developed and genius becomes an infinite capacity for taking pains. So Newton thoroughly understood Galileo’s work on falling bodies and Clerk-Maxwell thoroughly understood Newton when he developed new equations to deal with the electro-magnetic world. You have a position achieved, a development, the transmission of a development (just 200 copies of Newton’s book were sold by1700) and new questions arising, because the development achieved does not answer everything.
Lonergan has understanding arising on the basis of belief. The teacher needs to understand if he is to achieve the transmission of some subject. Much of our knowing, based as it is on widespread belief, is notional. For teaching, though, insight is needed. It is worth noting that insight is into phantasm which has been formed into a schematic image which yields the appropriate understanding – which may then be expressed one way or another, in a simple way to children for example. A true insight can yield a general proposition for similars are similarly understood.
A teacher with insight not only successfully appropriates past achievement but is in a position to pass it on. Such ‘tradition’ goes on in many different areas, in Science, History, Philosophy, Theology and the practice of religion. Advance in one are can go with weakness in another. Bishop Grant used to say, ‘if we knew how to pass on our religion to the next generation, England would be Catholic by now’. A careerist culture is bad not only for religion – ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’ – but also for marriage and having children. I have spoken to women in their 40s who never noticed they were missing a family. A sheerly scientific emphasis informs technology wonderfully but focussing on the already out there now real fails to discern the human spirit in its curiosity as the prime mover. Historians may eliminate the finger of God. Perhaps this analysis shows up the importance of genuine love and genuine insights in the transmission of religious tradition. The philosopher can avoid entrapment in error and point up the polymorphic consciousness of man.
I recall at Oscott in the 1960s a sense of relief that we did not have to deal with Latin. Was not everything translated these days? I recall too a slight sense of surprise and disappointment about the matter. Was I witnessing a sort of decline? Or was it progress for I was training to be a priest in England in the late twentieth century? I would need to be in the same world as the people I was ministering to. The result though is I find myself dealing with a scriptural tradition with just a smattering of Latin, Greek and Hebrew. My Latin has gradually picked up a bit and a few Greek and Hebrew words somehow enter our contemporary Catholic culture. I am somehow aware my formation in the area of languages could be better.
It is worth recalling Lonergan’s words: ‘Excellence in any walk of life is ever a matter of effort, training, education, encouragement, support.’ (3rd Collection, p. 119) Encouragement and support normally come from the older generation though of course they might come as special grace from Heaven. One catches a glimpse here of the fact that teaching is a vocation not a job and that it is the sharing with another of a personal achievement. Where education is going on genuinely there is therefore a special union between teacher and pupil.
Lonergan sees the ground, the starting point of education as affectivity. I rather suspect that often the teacher approaches a difficult situation with a multitude in half rebellion with the idea he must show who is in control! Affectivity is the last thing one demonstrates in an age full of fear about child abuse. Affectivity when the world is starved of it is likely to be misinterpreted. There are those in psychological damage for whom affectivity leads to compulsive conduct. So perhaps the idea needs restoration. Surely it does!
First, parents and mothers particularly are supremely rich in affection to their children. I recall a religious sister, Mother Rosario, at the age of 80 kicking a football with some little children – she had obviously won their hearts. Our Lord, when he first deals with the fishermen invites them to ‘come and see’ where he lived. Did he who after his resurrection cooked them breakfast by the Sea of Galilee take them to some remote cell where he made them some mint tea? He was known as a glutton and a wine bibber, a friend of tax collectors and sinners and about this wining and dining way of life he claims ‘wisdom is justified by her children’. When risen and dumbfounding, he asks for a bit of fish, I think we may envisage he was asking for a meal, and in the course of it he might have asked Peter how his mother’s health was. The art of winning affection and so setting a context for further things to go on would obviously be vital for those in communications, for example those who preach or teach. St Paul urges us to ‘let all people feel your warmth of heart’.
Lonergan has the realm of ‘values’ rising from the world of affection. So the Irish novices learned from older monks the value of Latin, and the children playing football with Sister Rosario picked up in a way the value of being a nun. I was blessing a couple of 3 year olds. One kept attending to her teddy bear. It was explained to me later that she was trying to get the bear to make the Sign of the Cross. She had picked up directly my concern to bless another.
I think we often think that values arise from abstract principles. Kant apparently disparaged emotions when it came to moral principles. There is a difference between those who think that abstract principles are self evident and those who argue that an abstraction flows from an insight, and an insight has emotion about it (Archimedes) as well as a schematic image of some sort.
Lonergan then has beliefs arising on values, including of course the value of believing other people who are creditworthy. Belief allows a division of labour with regard to knowing and so expands enormously the scale of what may be known, whether the matter is secular or religious. While Lonergan has beliefs arising from values one should note that one appropriates many values through belief. Knowledge comes at us in the form of propositions which may be true and certain or which may be opinions or which may be genuine fiction or even a lie, an attempt to deceive. May one see this general making use of belief to communicate all sorts of things as founding Cardinal Newman’s idea of notional assent? So many matters have to be known that not everything can be known with very great clarity and sureness.
It may be thought that what one wants to encourage is individual giftedness even unto genius and that the world of belief is somehow an impediment to this. One wants a historian with bright ideas, but to be a good historian does one not need to apply oneself to the relevant data? Perhaps some educational ideas today derive from the Enlightenment’s stress on Reason and its disparagement of Tradition. Once one realises that most knowledge is transmitted by belief one cannot avoid realising that a belief system is a tradition of some sort, and so even in scientific or historical matters, the Enlightenment position gets radically developed and genius becomes an infinite capacity for taking pains. So Newton thoroughly understood Galileo’s work on falling bodies and Clerk-Maxwell thoroughly understood Newton when he developed new equations to deal with the electro-magnetic world. You have a position achieved, a development, the transmission of a development (just 200 copies of Newton’s book were sold by1700) and new questions arising, because the development achieved does not answer everything.
Lonergan has understanding arising on the basis of belief. The teacher needs to understand if he is to achieve the transmission of some subject. Much of our knowing, based as it is on widespread belief, is notional. For teaching, though, insight is needed. It is worth noting that insight is into phantasm which has been formed into a schematic image which yields the appropriate understanding – which may then be expressed one way or another, in a simple way to children for example. A true insight can yield a general proposition for similars are similarly understood.
A teacher with insight not only successfully appropriates past achievement but is in a position to pass it on. Such ‘tradition’ goes on in many different areas, in Science, History, Philosophy, Theology and the practice of religion. Advance in one are can go with weakness in another. Bishop Grant used to say, ‘if we knew how to pass on our religion to the next generation, England would be Catholic by now’. A careerist culture is bad not only for religion – ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’ – but also for marriage and having children. I have spoken to women in their 40s who never noticed they were missing a family. A sheerly scientific emphasis informs technology wonderfully but focussing on the already out there now real fails to discern the human spirit in its curiosity as the prime mover. Historians may eliminate the finger of God. Perhaps this analysis shows up the importance of genuine love and genuine insights in the transmission of religious tradition. The philosopher can avoid entrapment in error and point up the polymorphic consciousness of man.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)