Lonergan - Gadamer

On holiday in Donegal, I took Gadamer’s work and ploughed through it. Like every first read of a philosopher there were long sections which went over my head. Lonergan read him, approved of him in certain respects, and takes a few phrases from him. I think though Lonergan must have read other works as well about the geisteswissenschaften.
Gadamer and Lonergan agree about ordinary language. For Gadamer, ordinary language carries intelligibility immediately and caries the notion of being an all embracing way, which includes the subject as well as the object. For Gadamer the notion of being is just there. For Lonergan the notion of being shows itself in reflective judgement. He distinguishes notional being, like a mathematical theorem, and real being which is normally based on sense experience.
Gadamer seems to me weak on insight and judgement whereas these are central to Lonergan but he and Lonergan agree that metaphysics must include subject and object as opposed to just the object.
Gadamer’s position on language echoes Socrates’ advice on dealing with a sceptic: ‘get them to talk’, for if you talk you cannot help making affirmations and denials and giving reasons. One of the problems of the Mass Media, Internet culture is I suspect that an interesting world can sweep in without eliciting a personal response beyond a further click on the mouse. One could though accuse reading of the same fault. The genius of conversation is that it ‘takes off’ so that the participants do not know where it is going, to what conclusions it might lead or to what disagreements indeed. Lonergan though is on the same point when he talks about the importance of the maiutic art. Parents might well ask what should they do if one of their children falls silent. If we are made to be through discussion, question, answer moving into a richer world made known by language then silence is a sort of death, a death of the spirit.
Gadamer will trace a word through the Greek, the Latin and the modern language and discern a nuance of change in the concept. A particular language carries the resonance of history into our consciousness. An example which occurs to me is the word ‘inquisition’ for the English. It carries the fear of Spain, the backward primitiveness of Catholicism and the cruelty of torture as a sort of resonance. The word ‘Renaissance’ has a more or less positive meaning for everyone, whereas the word Reformation has negative overtones for English Catholics. Lonergan writes of man leaving the world of the nursery and through language entering the world of meaning and value. He does not seem to notice language itself as spoken as a carrier of historically shaped values. Instead he automatically thinks of the philosophic background – Stoicism to understand Tertullian, Middle Platonism to understand Origen, Aristotle to understand Aquinas, the lack of a commonly accepted philosophy to understand the post Vatican Two Catholic Church.
I think this difference between Gadamer and Lonergan may be understood by the difference between Cardinal Newman’s notional assent and his real assent. So language leads us into a world of notional assent and established concepts and definitions. We can live at ease in such a world for nothing matters very much. If the situation changes we can readjust our thinking appropriately like the vicar of Bray. Language will carry into the future the decisions we have made. So for a few centuries, Catholic and Papist became terms of deep opprobrium. Isaac Newton could not think of Catholics as human.
Newman’s ‘real assent’ is not just a matter of learning a language and picking up its nuances. It is a matter of thinking a thing through and coming to certainty on a point. We may do this by a convergence of probabilities and through evidences which come and go. So a general knows it is vital to advance immediately, a currency speculator knows the dollar is to fall. There are degrees of certainty it seems. St Paul has ‘If it is certain that . . . it is even more certain’. If it is certain that we should reduce CO2 emissions it is even more certain that we should ‘feed the hungry’. An infallible judgement is an unusual form of certainty, then. There can though be infallible judgements about humble matters as well as matters of revelation, for example, ‘I am at the present moment the subject of sense experience’.
When we think things through and reach a conclusion we do so on the basis of a philosophic attainment which operates whether we acknowledge it or not. So Tertullian, under Stoic influence, thought what is real must be bodily and so could not avoid subordinationism in thinking about the Trinity. The Trinity is like the Sun, the Light and the Heat. The real must be imaginable. St Athanasius’ position on Nicaea (325AD) is different. Truth lies in the true proposition. ‘What is said of the Father must be said of the Son, except the Son is not the Father’.
Later than Nicaea, we find Augustine realising that the mind is made to follow truth wherever it leads. He is called ‘the father of the West’. He accepts propositions handed down but he is not tied to them. So he explores the Trinity in terms of the psychology of knowledge and love. With Athanasius and Augustine we find the mighty fact of revelation leads gradually to an appropriation of the powers of the mind, and so to a Catholic philosophy.
With Aquinas we find the realisation that ‘Ens et verum convertuntur’. As the mind comes to a true judgement, so it comes to know what is. What is, being in toto, includes the mind that puzzles and explores as well as the object that is thought about. With Aristotle though there was a relative neglect of the subjective side of things, a consequence of which might be that there are still some who think correctly of God as the supreme being, and as three persons in one God, but fail to advert to the fact that God is conscious and indeed conscious of being God in three different conscious ways.
Whereas the context of St Augustine’s thought was Platonic and coming to any truth involved the active participation of God in the process, for Aquinas there was a realisation that the human intellect was not only sense bound but autonomous. It could reach true conclusions or fail to do so. His famous remark that beside his mystical experience all he had written was straw has made me wonder whether the point of the analogy is that straw is combustible material. Did he glimpse that the autonomy of intellect as well as will could lead to a Godless world with man arranged against man with the cleverest weapons? Was his remark in this way prophetic?
This autonomy of intellect led with Descartes to the autonomy of philosophy. Philosophy subsequently has been hugely under the influence of the developing sciences or in a sort of conscious reaction with Phenomenology, Existentialism and Personalism. Man’s capacity to reach true conclusions has been lost. Lonergan wrote that in France, Germany, Northern Italy, the Netherlands ‘Being is lost’. One might add, ‘significant communication is lost’. It is hard for the Church to thrive in such a situation. Some have tried to make ‘presence’ substitute for ‘being’.
To his credit, for Gadamer being is not lost. It is entrapped in our ordinary linguistic experience which has not been grasped. For Newman it is attained in real assent. For Lonergan it is attained with certainty when the appropriate evidence is in – ‘the virtually unconditioned’ – and with infallibility in certain cases, dealing with the simplest matters as well as the highest. Speaking of the highest Aquinas said, ‘The argument from authority is the weakest argument except when the authority is divine’.