Animal Extroversion and Human Extroversion

Sometimes reading Lonergan one gets the impression that one is being led into an abstract, idealistic and academic terrain and losing ones sense of the real. One can say humorously, but I think with accuracy, that Kant lost the universe in his study, a somewhat careless omission. That means though that one should approach philosophers with care, for their craziness might seep into ones personal system. Actually, it might seep into ones social system and cultural system and lead to such aberrations as concentration camps and Health Services which deal out death in the womb or to the aged.
One might hope that the absence of philosophy might leave humane instinctive complexes in place to govern human conduct. Would that it were so! I think doctors ceased taking the Hippocratic Oath because in an enlightened, civilized modern world there could be no question of using medical knowledge to kill people. There was a naïve optimism reposing upon sound human instincts and the sense of progress, of humanity marching forward under the banner of Science, Reason and Education. With universal education how could Democracy go wrong?
The realm of philosophy is problematic to most of us. We would like to sidestep the issue and rely on our immediate sense of the concrete and the good. We tend therefore to dismiss Lonergan for he would take us beyond our naivety and through idealism to critical realism. We feel ill equipped for the journey and put away the books!
I propose in this essay two objectives. The first is to show that Lonergan is not unfriendly or dismissive of our naïve world of extroversion and the second to show that the world of ‘critical realism’, lying beyond idealism or conceptualism or whatever is already the world we occupy in a de facto way. We are in the way of Chesterton’s traveller who voyaged a long way to come to a place which he discovered was his original home.
In his early work ‘Verbum’ Lonergan writes about animal extroversion, how a dog knows a bone and what to do with it, and, quoting Aquinas, how a pack of dogs, chasing a fox, discovering it did not go this way or that, will immediately rush along the only other option, demonstrating a sort of pragmatic grasp of the ‘excluded middle’ – a thing either is or is not – and so acting much as Sherlock Holmes would do.
So Lonergan, who describes the animals as ‘doing very well’, recognises in them a fringe of intelligence whereby they become well adapted to their habitat, with its sometimes exciting possibilities and the dangers to be avoided.
Lonergan sees man arriving in the world as cradled in an environment of love. He (or she!) is set not to live just in a habitat, with instinctive and intelligent responses but in the entire universe of being. Access to this wider world is very gradual. It does not ever deny the immediate world of animal extroversion and so like the animals man has a fringe of intelligence operating upon what is immediately present. This fringe though is radically interpersonal and charged with love and emotion. So it is that the hand which rocks the cradle rules the world.
The world we arrive in is filed with concrete intelligibility. I do not like spinach! I do not .like being abandoned. O dear, I have wet my pants and my mother will be annoyed. Very quickly as humans we start to use words which relate us not just to the here and now but to a wider world which expresses the achievement of our parents and the wider world into which we have been born. We learn, if we are so lucky, to read and to distinguish between the true and the imaginary – we come to recognise and know a wider real world, to take our part in it, and , in truth even to die for it. Indeed, if it should be our lamentable fate to die in our beds as opposed to the glory of martyrdom or legitimate military self sacrifice, then maybe the world of meaning we have discovered will allow all our living and dying to be to the glory of God and united with Christ in his Paschal Mystery. The world of meaning relates us to all that is and shows us the deep significance of an apparently trivial existence. Indeed all is to be revealed with eternal glory or eternal shame.
With such high themes running through our consciousness or with the constant effort to repress such high themes and reduce ourselves to a comfortable mediocrity if possible, it is hard for us to analyse and come to realise the importance of the world of immediacy to our intelligent, rational and responsible life. Lonergan gives the example of an eclipse. If we have lived long enough we are all aware of this phenomenon. We all know that light lights up the object on which it falls. If we had to explain so obvious a thing as that light can get blocked by a solid object such as the earth or the moon, we would have to go into an endless process of explanation. So our understanding of the world rests on things we know by experience. The world we live in has questions. When will the next eclipse occur? To answer the question satisfactorily we have to enter the world of expertise.
We find ourselves caught then between the word of animal extroversion, the world of immediacy, the out there, now, real world to which we must respond instinctively, immediately and vitally if we are to live and the wider world of meanings which we have come to know through our formation. ‘Critical realism’ is a matter of recognising the fact that alongside truth there can be lies, that history tends to be written by the victors, that there is reward for getting with it and forgetting ones deep instinct for personal integrity.
‘Critical realism’ seeks to help us recognise what is true. A big question now is climate change and global warming. Let us distinguish. Climate change goes on age after ice age. Global warming is man’s contribution. Because global warming is accepted by the Royal College of science and the governments of the world land is being used to make petrol rather than to make food. The drastic consequence is that people in poor parts cannot afford food, and they and their families go hungry. Of course we should love the world God has made. Of course we should care for the ecology down to the smallest butterfly. Of course we should be rational and avoid traffic jams. ‘Critical Realism’ would ask whether we are. Certain people must starve to prevent the immediate end of the world?
The issue here – shall the world end, shall the poor starve? – indicates that the realm of meaning also bring us into the realm of value, of deliberation, concern, choice, implementation. Inescapably it brings us into the realm of faith. Is the world grounded in a God so good that he has made a world where reasonable choices are possible? If that is so we must dismiss any option that means the poor must starve. We must dismiss too any option which shortens the life of the world. Like the hounds chasing the fox we must find the route that is possible, that makes a future possible. The dramatic thought is that this route might depend on personal self denial!