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.