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!