The World Constitutive Function of Meaning

There are different world views, and one might improve the statement by saying different operative world views. I once had a curate who as a boy used to serve Mass in a chapel outside which a Littlewoods sign hung. He formed the view that by divine Providence he was destined to win the pools. Each Saturday evening would find him still disappointed. He would be the first to agree that our operative world views do not always call upon our rational power to recognise baloney. So Fr Lonergan writes ‘the constructions of intelligence without the control of reasonableness yield not philosophy but myth, not science but magic, not astronomy but astrology, not chemistry but alchemy, not history but legend’ and I suppose one might add not religion but superstition.
If meaning operating with a rational control gives us a knowledge of empirical science and history, by the same token it gives us a knowledge of ourselves. Knowledge of the world and of the self advance pari passu.
I came across a physicist who thought there must be a load of parallel universes because the chances were against such a universe as this, showing as it were, design features. I think this theory makes the assumption that because a thing can be thought therefore it must exist. In rational reflection or judgement the truth of some theory is recognised and others are dismissed. The fact that our world shows evidence of design does not mean that therefore there must be millions of universes lacking design just as the fact of Hamlet being written does not mean there have been millions of monkeys playing with typewriters. It was William of Ockham who wrote ‘entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate’ (beings should not be multiplied without necessity).
There is a way of thinking about things which is sensible and rational. The Royal College for Science in insisting on experiment or observation is insisting on the sensible as a basis for judgements which belong to empirical science. But it is not only the world of empirical science which is sensible. The interpersonal world of human relations does not get along without senses operating on such things as smiles and letters.
The scientist operating on billions and billions of parallel universes, while he may know much about the cosmos around, would seem not to have adverted to his own power of rational judgement. The writing of Hamlet is better explained and adequately explained by accepting that William Shakespeare was a brilliant playwright. Alongside billions of atoms the scientist needs to recognise his own mind and how to use it sensibly.
After writing Insight (finished 1954, published 1957) Lonergan became aware of a distinction he had not made which is important. He had a conversation with Fr Coreth, and realised that there is a distinction between real being and notional being. One may or may not prove Pythagoras’ theorem, but the matter is notional. An apple though, manifesting itself through senses, is real. There is a sensible and a notional realm proportionate to man’s intellect. The distinction is so obvious that it is surprising that a book like Insight could be written without making it. The human intellect is like a highly charged snail. It works very thoroughly on what is within its range. It makes an advance in its horizon very slowly. Any advance is very slow for it is through not knowing to knowing, through question to answer and through question which does not have an appropriate heuristic structure set up. So for that scientist, for whom the formation of a notion constitutes reality it will be a gradual affair to gather the fact that it is through human judgement that he recognises reality. The already out there now real world has to recognise also the discriminating power of the human mind. He will need to attend to a different sort of data, namely himself in his conscious operations, he will need to form a hypothesis and verify it.
A point to verify, by way of example, is the proposition that it is foolish to withhold judgement when the evidence is in. I find a pretty persuasive instance is the bank statement when I can recognise all the items of expenditure and income! Or it would be foolish to deny one is cold when the wind bites. It would be foolish to deny the invasion of William the Conqueror, the religious changes brought about by Henry VIII or the industrial revolution. Our world consists of things we experience directly like sunrise or sunset and things we have learned about from others. Indeed without the words ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ we might not consciously advert to something so obvious. The world mediated by language and its meaning is very largely the totality of the world we know. The world of meaning perhaps even shapes the psyche and so the things we might imagine, feel and think about. Meaning expressed helps us to notice the world we already experience. So by expressing the idea of rational reflection which acknowledges truth or probability or falsehood one would help the multi-universe scientist to appropriate a personal activity he is constantly entering upon.
Alongside the meaning which shapes us there is the meaning which we bring to bear upon the world so as to shape its future – our expressions, our aims, our work and our capacity to persevere. Alongside a world of meanings which shape our culture in a general way, there are the meanings which we bring into the world personally, especially through the depth and uniqueness of interpersonal love.
One can talk about the being of meaning and indeed the health of meaning in a particular culture or a particular life. A humanist culture, for example, is not open to the love of God. A depressed person has lost much of the sense of personal meaning. If meaning is constitutive of our world, then there are aberrations of meaning leading to sad worlds for people. When the Word walked among us he restored the full health of meaning by deed as well as word: ‘you will know the truth and the truth will make you free’. All things are made new in the light of God’s meaning.
I would like to return to Fr Coreth’s important distinction between real being and notional being. Real being bears witness to God, for the things which exist need not exist. Their existence therefore bears witness to God ‘who made all things, visible and invisible out of nothing’ (Lateran Council, 1215).
Does notional reality also bear witness to God? Notional reality does not exist without a thinker thinking the thought. Just as the physicist could conceive an infinite number of parallel universes, so we find the human mind is capable of conceiving infinity in perhaps an infinite number of different ways. With notional reality we find the ‘potens omnia facere et fieri’ the power to make and become all things of Aristotle and Aquinas. We find a hint of the truth stated by Augustine, ‘you have made us for yourself dear Lord and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee’. With our capacity to think infinite thoughts can we think the thought of the total of the content of possible notional reality as actual? Snail like in any development we cannot claim to have such a content before our mind’s eye. When we think notionally about Pythagoras or some such are we inventing or discovering? If discovering, then the thing discovered must already be thought and so there must be the original thinker of all possible thought, before whom all possibilities are actual, even creation, the possibility of an actual world with its own autonomies, even the deadly autonomy of sin. Such is God. I am close to St Anselm’s argument, it is greater to be than to be thought. The thinker is more than a set of thoughts. There is an amusing (?) moment when Bertrand Russell in Trinity Street said ‘Heavens, Anselm is right’. He never lost the idea of God but could not himself live in a Godly way.