Philosophy and Culture

Alongside the natural sciences and historical scholarship philosophy too aspires to its own autonomy. One might see Descartes as the pioneer of modern philosophy with his quest for clear and distinct ideas, his Cognito ergo sum and his distinction between res extensa and res cognitans.
Hitherto religion and philosophy had grown together. There was not a conflict felt between being religious and being philosophic. The Greek Academy was in conflict with the Polis, but the first mover was an object of their thought, and thinking things through was an engagement with the divine.
The Library in Alexandria allowed Jewish scholars to absorb Greek philosophy and so to rank silver with mud, since all is earth, air, heat or water. The Christians found they had to use argument to defend the faith especially against the Gnostics who drew on Plato. St Justin Martyr is the pioneer here – he had got to know and love the Greeks before he was converted by an old man at Ephesus, presumably a disciple of St John.
The Greek philosophers, though they had ‘the first mover’ did not have Creation, God making everything out of nothing. St Augustine had the idea but it was defined at the Lateran Council 1215. ‘God made all things visible and invisible out of nothing’. The Greeks discovered the mind and the principle of the excluded middle, either a thing is or is not, there is no half way house between being and not being, but in 1215 you get this massive reason for being – if a thing is, it is because Almighty God made it.
The idea gives one a universe which is basically intelligible since God made it. It is a very powerful idea. I recall a ten year old shifting from the Genesis account of things to the big bang theory and saying, ‘Where did the big bang come from? If there was a big bang God must have made it.’ Who would want to argue with such clarity of thought? One catches a glimpse of Aristotle’s proposition that the intellect is potens omnia facere et fieri. If Descartes was looking for ideas which are clear and distinct, here is one which he believed but failed to notice and failed to doubt. Lonergan says something much more obscure when he says ‘if being is totally intelligible, then God must exist’. Before we explore Lonergan, I think in this context it is worth mentioning Plotinus, the realm of being, and dichotomies. The mind is made for the totality but it recognises radical distinctions, between for example, uncreated being and created being, between mineral being and vegetable being. At a glance the mind can hold in view a universe which is mineral, vegetative, animal, human, angelic and, if we call on the Lateran Council, made out of nothing by Almighty God. The dichotomies mark different levels of being and so different modes of study.
The ten year old was, I think, calling upon an archetypal mode of thinking which relates cause to effect. In the history of thought this is Aristotle, for when we understand the cause we understand what’s going on. The ten year old though was ignorant of Aristotle but had moved from infancy into the realm of meaning which is motivated by value. She had learned a language and had acquired a sense of right and wrong. I think one can recognise causality as part of this common sense realm. The cat knocks the precious porcelain off the shelf or she does. The disaster has a cause, and if she did it, it is truthfulness and right to own up.
Karl Jung noticed archetypes shaping man’s consciousness – I suspect sexuality is one for we all recognise that we are male or female and have to learn what we should do about the matter. Cardinal Newman, when a child, thought there had been a cosmic accident and he should have been an angel. We have the difficulty of dealing with a God who is not only more Heavenly minded than we are but also more Earthly minded. He made Heaven and Earth!
I suspect that the archetypes which shape us are enormously influenced by the culture into which we are born. An Indian child of three may already know how a little girl should dance. I suspect that Karl Jung’s archetypes were very symbolic and affective, so a horse represents death for some reason. I suspect our own consciousness moves spontaneously into archetypes which have a considerable intellectual content. So is it true that ‘water’ means the stuff which comes down from the sky and out of the tap? Without judgements of this sort it would be impossible to learn a language and everyone capable does so. As one enters the realms of story, the question ‘is it true?’ means ‘did it really happen?’ I suggest the idea of reality is archetypal, an expression of the eros of the mind. I suspect that for most of us there is an ‘adjustment to reality’ – as for the child Jesus when he realised he should be obedient, or Cardinal Newman when he realised he must cope with a cosmic accident. There are children of 11 years old in India who have no option but to spend the day weaving carpets. I think though that the idea of cause and effect is also archetypal. It would explain praise and blame. It is a huge jump in the mind of course to leap from explaining a tidy bedroom resulting from one’s personal efforts to an entire universe resulting from an act of divine will. The intellect though is set for these jumps for it is capax omnia and how should it proceed to invisible things except from visible things making use of analogy?
I am not really in a position to judge the usefulness of Lonergan’s remark, ‘if the real is totally intelligible, God must exist’. I think it has to do with potency and limited act. The young child had a structure to explain everything but actually knew very little. Lonergan perhaps is talking about a richer de facto situation where we have come to know and be sure about some things. Upon that basis questions can arise and other things come to be known, perhaps by future generations. If questions endlessly lead to intelligible answers, then there must be an intelligible ground to the universe which is, who is also intelligent. Lonergan works from the ground up – all knowledge rests on previous knowledge – whereas the ten year old works from the top down. Certain utterances from Lonergan also work from the top down. Perhaps what we are seeing instanced here is ‘methodology’, appropriate advance from what has been achieved in a field.
The modern philosophic movement from Descartes on has rightly asserted the autonomy of philosophy. It asserts intelligence but has lost the yardstick of truth. Lonergan thinks that the object of the mind can gradually move from the possible to the probable to the certain. There is a yardstick to be found, different in measure in different areas, yet leading to a certain judgement, so that we live in a world we in part know. Questions remain belonging to ones time. Abelard had his 157 propositions sic et non. Today in a global world we live with questions about global warming, climate change and ecological responsibility. We might have questions too about the economy and its problems. Each science, each area of scholarship, including theology, lives and develops by a gradual movement through question to answer to further questions. This is not a matter of faith but of fact.