Subsidiarity and the Economy
Lonergan wanted to find a solution to the slump which would come ‘from below’, from the banks and businesses, from the workers and from the consumers. He wanted to avoid placing the economy in the hands of expert economists and the State. For this reason he was opposed to John Maynard Keynes who would deal with a slump by deficit spending. He thought dependence that way would harm human welfare, reducing the actual flow of goods and services. He praised Capitalism for seeking to meet effective demand, seeking to supply what people wanted and could pay for.
In the 1940’s he saw the problem as emerging from a lack of investment. In the 1970’s he followed critics of the multinational firms, but he did not produce a major work on the matter. He urged a creative collaboration from many disciplines.
One way of solving the lack of investment problem is of course to bring about a great new investment in a needed area, and I would suggest that energy supply is exactly an area which, with old plants failing, calls for heavy investment.
I am not for various reasons suggesting nuclear energy but I believe Iceland has beyond banks some thermal conditions which would allow the supply of a deal of energy. The financing of this could be a private, should be private. The capital injected would go out in wages and stimulate demand. Properly designed our future energy requirements would be met. Something similar could be done with the Wash and the Bristol Channel.
Of course, for a global economy to recover by way of investment there would need to be similar projects everywhere.
Howsoever, let us suppose we extend the boom this way for 20 years, when it comes to an end we would face the same problem again.
In the absence of such major investment my solution to the credit crunch is tax cuts on business, no VAT, and a care to charge only a reasonable mark up.
Sitting in the Presbytery the truth is I have no clear idea of what a reasonable mark up should be. Companies will need to repair their equipment, they may need new investment. May I suggest the mark up should just cover repairs? The banks are there to create credit for vast new projects. So if the water board is making a new reservoir it should not raise the money from the customer, except when by increasing supplies it increases revenues. It is not the task of the customer to be forced to be a capitalist as well, and without the benefit which comes from taking a well judged risk.
Tuesday 23 December 2008
Meanings and Values
Someone was speaking about ‘Catholic values’ and I felt I might be in the realm of pious platitudes. Could one say, from a personal stance, values are dearly held commitments? So that a Catholic value would be the dearly held commitment to get myself to Mass on a Sunday, if possible, even when one is on holiday?
The valuing, the personal commitment, does not make the value. The value is valuable in its own right. I recall at university in the 1960s coming across some paper about the likely effect of a nuclear war. Whole territories would be wiped out. I found myself desolated at such a prospect, and committed if possible to find another way. I was recognising the value of human life and agreeing with the teaching of the Church which condemned the mass destruction of cities. The same value can be expressed as a principle and deeply held as a conviction, as a commitment. As an insight leads to conceptualisation, commitment may lead to expression in principles. It seems to me though that commitment may bind one without it being expressed in abstract principles. A parent might be committed to his daughter’s education without abstracting about the matter.
Values are expressed in commitments and lived. Good people are not all ethicists or moral theologians. A good person though might confront a dilemma and be helped to reach a decision by someone who has studied the matter. We meet here the idea of substructure and superstructure. One person has the substructure of a good will in operation. The expert though is able to help by having a reflective superstructure, rather as human life is lived with meanings and values by one group and thematised by historians. One concludes that though we don’t all have to be experts in morals it is helpful to all if there are some such experts around in the community in a vital and interactive way.
There needs to be ‘a teaching’ if those who are living in a substructural way, without too much analysis, are to be guided, and the ‘good will’ of the good person needs to move confidently to the advice and instruction of those who are expert. There is a submissiveness here but it is for the sake of life, excellence and achievement of some sort.
I have the sense that there needs to be some restoration of confidence in this area. I me someone recently who was talking about a person who was a good Christian as well as a Catholic, as if Catholicism was a sort of drag, contained a bias, against being a good Christian.
Fr Lonergan in his Third Collection writes about authenticity, about self transcendence and about norms belonging to attentiveness, intelligence, rationality and conduct so that we live with truth, reality and the excellence of goodness, the happiness of a clear conscience.
The values we have to recognise are not simply deontological but also, to coin a term, dehistorical. We need to recognise that we have a body which is alive and that life is always a divine gift, so we should not bump people off, ourselves or other people (deontological values). We need to recognise that we are historically conditioned and that issues have emerged which it is a duty to address, racialism for example or the way through the present ‘credit crunch’. Current permissiveness and abortion might seem to be simply ‘deontological’ issues, but the issue seems to stand with historical ideas, like the woman’s right to choose, or the way ‘a civilised society’ deals with private sexual morality or ‘human rights’. Civilised values, to be truly civilised, need the realism to recognise their deontological base.
By authenticity, Lonergan means something cumulative over time. So Newman at one stage thought he ought to be an angel and there had been a mistake, that he ought to be an evangelist, that he ought to be a Catholic (but not a Roman Catholic) and then that he ought to be a Roman Catholic. These are changes of position (should we call them ‘conversions’?) whereby he moves from thinking he is an angel entrapped in flesh to accepting that he has the down to earth dignity of a human being combined with the baptismal grace which made him a child of God. A secular example of authenticity is that of Eddington who before the First War got interested in Einstein, who during the war stayed loyal to that interest despite strong pressure against because Einstein was German, and who after the war, verified his theory at some expense. (I have seen it said that the cloud cover on the occasion of the eclipse was so great that Eddington could not have verified the theory. If so that would be inauthenticity, showing that the cumulative product can be rare.)
Authenticity issues in self transcendence. Perhaps self transcendence is not a perfect term for it rather implies that the self is left behind, whereas the point is that the life of the self requires going beyond the self but in a way which involves the self with another of some sort.
There is a problem here for we cannot avoid being the central figure in our flesh and blood experiences. The problem was solved by the Greeks in that we choose what is more excellent and we do choose what is most excellent, wisdom, by which we recognise another.
Lonergan has us oriented to self transcendence by the dreams of the morning in which, though as victims, we are in symbolic mood facing the challenge of the day and of life. He has us waking to a world of sensible stimuli, like toothpaste and cups of coffee, and I recognise here the world of animal extroversion which stays with us all the time since we are animals, set to jump if there is a big bang. As shaped up by our parents, by human history, by our personal splash we find ourselves living beyond animal extroversion in a world mediated by meaning and motivated by values.
Between the dream and consciousness symbols have the difference that they can become utterly precise and demanding. At Downside the bell rang and though still half asleep we had to get up and go through our hygienic ablutions in preparation for Holy Mass. By symbol we are oriented to action and so to the mighty stage of history. If the bell is a symbol mediating meaning and value, life thereafter included systems of symbols coming at one to be mastered, the language, mathematics, physics, chemistry, the game of rugby. In Easter and Summer terms I found relief in catching trout which I suppose was a near return to the world of animal extroversion. Nothing was ever more surprising and exciting.
Still by work and signs and examples one came to know the world one lived in and how one should conduct oneself, meanings and values. Truth to tell, meanings and disvalues as well. There was the public school world and the rest of the world and was not Downside the Eton of the Catholic Schools? About growing in wisdom there is a lot of unlearning the tradition one has received, so that coming to live in the real world is a continuous conversion helped by symbolic structures and also by other people in the richness and also the poverty of their living.
Undergirding authenticity and self transcendence Lonergan has the term normative. ‘Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible.’ There are norms at each level, so if there is cloud cover one should not pretend to astronomical observations. The norms around the precept ‘be responsible’ are different from the others, for ‘be responsible’ requires that there be options. The precept is concerned with how one should use one’s freedom. The self transcendence of knowing brings the self into knowledge of the world. How one should act though, except in extraordinary circumstances, gives one a set of options and so you get deliberation and choice. By free choice one changes the world, other people and above all ones own self.
There is a dreaming self transcendence of a sort, a sensitive self transcendence, a cognitive self transcendence and a performative self transcendence but these all occur in the context of an affective self transcendence which may be more in potency than act. Our living finds its meaning in love, at the heart of which is or is not the love of God. In a world of distractions and biases, of cares and worries, the awareness of the centrality of God’s love needs to be reflected upon, understood and assiduously cared about. You get the world of religion with morning prayer and night prayer. You get intimacy with the sacrament and sacramentality of marriage. You get a relevant loyalty with sincere and effective love of neighbour even across the sea, even in the distant future.
The valuing, the personal commitment, does not make the value. The value is valuable in its own right. I recall at university in the 1960s coming across some paper about the likely effect of a nuclear war. Whole territories would be wiped out. I found myself desolated at such a prospect, and committed if possible to find another way. I was recognising the value of human life and agreeing with the teaching of the Church which condemned the mass destruction of cities. The same value can be expressed as a principle and deeply held as a conviction, as a commitment. As an insight leads to conceptualisation, commitment may lead to expression in principles. It seems to me though that commitment may bind one without it being expressed in abstract principles. A parent might be committed to his daughter’s education without abstracting about the matter.
Values are expressed in commitments and lived. Good people are not all ethicists or moral theologians. A good person though might confront a dilemma and be helped to reach a decision by someone who has studied the matter. We meet here the idea of substructure and superstructure. One person has the substructure of a good will in operation. The expert though is able to help by having a reflective superstructure, rather as human life is lived with meanings and values by one group and thematised by historians. One concludes that though we don’t all have to be experts in morals it is helpful to all if there are some such experts around in the community in a vital and interactive way.
There needs to be ‘a teaching’ if those who are living in a substructural way, without too much analysis, are to be guided, and the ‘good will’ of the good person needs to move confidently to the advice and instruction of those who are expert. There is a submissiveness here but it is for the sake of life, excellence and achievement of some sort.
I have the sense that there needs to be some restoration of confidence in this area. I me someone recently who was talking about a person who was a good Christian as well as a Catholic, as if Catholicism was a sort of drag, contained a bias, against being a good Christian.
Fr Lonergan in his Third Collection writes about authenticity, about self transcendence and about norms belonging to attentiveness, intelligence, rationality and conduct so that we live with truth, reality and the excellence of goodness, the happiness of a clear conscience.
The values we have to recognise are not simply deontological but also, to coin a term, dehistorical. We need to recognise that we have a body which is alive and that life is always a divine gift, so we should not bump people off, ourselves or other people (deontological values). We need to recognise that we are historically conditioned and that issues have emerged which it is a duty to address, racialism for example or the way through the present ‘credit crunch’. Current permissiveness and abortion might seem to be simply ‘deontological’ issues, but the issue seems to stand with historical ideas, like the woman’s right to choose, or the way ‘a civilised society’ deals with private sexual morality or ‘human rights’. Civilised values, to be truly civilised, need the realism to recognise their deontological base.
By authenticity, Lonergan means something cumulative over time. So Newman at one stage thought he ought to be an angel and there had been a mistake, that he ought to be an evangelist, that he ought to be a Catholic (but not a Roman Catholic) and then that he ought to be a Roman Catholic. These are changes of position (should we call them ‘conversions’?) whereby he moves from thinking he is an angel entrapped in flesh to accepting that he has the down to earth dignity of a human being combined with the baptismal grace which made him a child of God. A secular example of authenticity is that of Eddington who before the First War got interested in Einstein, who during the war stayed loyal to that interest despite strong pressure against because Einstein was German, and who after the war, verified his theory at some expense. (I have seen it said that the cloud cover on the occasion of the eclipse was so great that Eddington could not have verified the theory. If so that would be inauthenticity, showing that the cumulative product can be rare.)
Authenticity issues in self transcendence. Perhaps self transcendence is not a perfect term for it rather implies that the self is left behind, whereas the point is that the life of the self requires going beyond the self but in a way which involves the self with another of some sort.
There is a problem here for we cannot avoid being the central figure in our flesh and blood experiences. The problem was solved by the Greeks in that we choose what is more excellent and we do choose what is most excellent, wisdom, by which we recognise another.
Lonergan has us oriented to self transcendence by the dreams of the morning in which, though as victims, we are in symbolic mood facing the challenge of the day and of life. He has us waking to a world of sensible stimuli, like toothpaste and cups of coffee, and I recognise here the world of animal extroversion which stays with us all the time since we are animals, set to jump if there is a big bang. As shaped up by our parents, by human history, by our personal splash we find ourselves living beyond animal extroversion in a world mediated by meaning and motivated by values.
Between the dream and consciousness symbols have the difference that they can become utterly precise and demanding. At Downside the bell rang and though still half asleep we had to get up and go through our hygienic ablutions in preparation for Holy Mass. By symbol we are oriented to action and so to the mighty stage of history. If the bell is a symbol mediating meaning and value, life thereafter included systems of symbols coming at one to be mastered, the language, mathematics, physics, chemistry, the game of rugby. In Easter and Summer terms I found relief in catching trout which I suppose was a near return to the world of animal extroversion. Nothing was ever more surprising and exciting.
Still by work and signs and examples one came to know the world one lived in and how one should conduct oneself, meanings and values. Truth to tell, meanings and disvalues as well. There was the public school world and the rest of the world and was not Downside the Eton of the Catholic Schools? About growing in wisdom there is a lot of unlearning the tradition one has received, so that coming to live in the real world is a continuous conversion helped by symbolic structures and also by other people in the richness and also the poverty of their living.
Undergirding authenticity and self transcendence Lonergan has the term normative. ‘Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible.’ There are norms at each level, so if there is cloud cover one should not pretend to astronomical observations. The norms around the precept ‘be responsible’ are different from the others, for ‘be responsible’ requires that there be options. The precept is concerned with how one should use one’s freedom. The self transcendence of knowing brings the self into knowledge of the world. How one should act though, except in extraordinary circumstances, gives one a set of options and so you get deliberation and choice. By free choice one changes the world, other people and above all ones own self.
There is a dreaming self transcendence of a sort, a sensitive self transcendence, a cognitive self transcendence and a performative self transcendence but these all occur in the context of an affective self transcendence which may be more in potency than act. Our living finds its meaning in love, at the heart of which is or is not the love of God. In a world of distractions and biases, of cares and worries, the awareness of the centrality of God’s love needs to be reflected upon, understood and assiduously cared about. You get the world of religion with morning prayer and night prayer. You get intimacy with the sacrament and sacramentality of marriage. You get a relevant loyalty with sincere and effective love of neighbour even across the sea, even in the distant future.
Economic Supplement 7
Reducing VAT
The purpose of an economy is to organise work upon the potencies of nature so that goods and services may stream forth to supply man’s needs.
When there is a deal of investment going on then there is a division of resources so that some are going, not directly to produce goods and services for households (for government and people), but to provide equipment for future production or education for future services.
G.D.P., Gross Domestic Product, is a familiar term but it lumps together current output for consumption and output sold to raise productivity in the future, concrete investment. So GDP is equal to output for consumption plus output for concrete investment. If investment is high people will be consuming less. Nevertheless it will be experienced as a boom time. People are employed. Prices are high, but everyone can afford something.
In a so called slump time, since investment has fallen away, output for consumption could increase. The trouble is that at current prices, only so much output can be afforded. With unemployment rising, the welfare state is likely to get into debt preventing dire poverty.
If the government reduces VAT then it may hope that prices may fall, more will be purchased as so what it loses in VAT it may recoup by less payments for unemployment benefit. For as more ‘output for consumption’ is sold so more people will be needed to work to make these things.
It could not be done overnight, but I would like VAT to be reduced to zero and corporation tax likewise. The task of business is to produce goods and services as cheaply as possible.
It is true that, if government requires 45% of the total output for consumption then income tax will need to be, on average, 45% of income, but the need for taxation is at the heart of politics and it is a good thing if the quantities can be seen clearly. ‘No taxation without representation’ is an ancient principle.
Apart from war, there are two ways of avoiding slump. The first is a widespread fall, not in inflation but in actual prices for consumers. The other is major new investment. I guess, actually, we need major new investment in energy provision. If the electricity goes off nothing in this house works and I hade best go to bed and perhaps expire. I gather there is energy in Iceland in the way of thermal activity. If the government assisted private investment in this area I think it would be promoting the common good and considerably easing the slump.
The purpose of an economy is to organise work upon the potencies of nature so that goods and services may stream forth to supply man’s needs.
When there is a deal of investment going on then there is a division of resources so that some are going, not directly to produce goods and services for households (for government and people), but to provide equipment for future production or education for future services.
G.D.P., Gross Domestic Product, is a familiar term but it lumps together current output for consumption and output sold to raise productivity in the future, concrete investment. So GDP is equal to output for consumption plus output for concrete investment. If investment is high people will be consuming less. Nevertheless it will be experienced as a boom time. People are employed. Prices are high, but everyone can afford something.
In a so called slump time, since investment has fallen away, output for consumption could increase. The trouble is that at current prices, only so much output can be afforded. With unemployment rising, the welfare state is likely to get into debt preventing dire poverty.
If the government reduces VAT then it may hope that prices may fall, more will be purchased as so what it loses in VAT it may recoup by less payments for unemployment benefit. For as more ‘output for consumption’ is sold so more people will be needed to work to make these things.
It could not be done overnight, but I would like VAT to be reduced to zero and corporation tax likewise. The task of business is to produce goods and services as cheaply as possible.
It is true that, if government requires 45% of the total output for consumption then income tax will need to be, on average, 45% of income, but the need for taxation is at the heart of politics and it is a good thing if the quantities can be seen clearly. ‘No taxation without representation’ is an ancient principle.
Apart from war, there are two ways of avoiding slump. The first is a widespread fall, not in inflation but in actual prices for consumers. The other is major new investment. I guess, actually, we need major new investment in energy provision. If the electricity goes off nothing in this house works and I hade best go to bed and perhaps expire. I gather there is energy in Iceland in the way of thermal activity. If the government assisted private investment in this area I think it would be promoting the common good and considerably easing the slump.
Metaphysics
One of us proposed the principle, from nothing, nothing comes as a clear point of metaphysics. It follows, of course, that since there is something, there must be God. There remains the task of proving something exists.
Lonergan says something similar about evolution, ‘It is only the cause of the whole universe that from lower species can bring about the emergence of successive higher species.’ (Third Collection, 24) I don’t know what Hawkins would make of that – the point thought would remain that to prove God’s existence this way you would have to prove the evolution of species. One recalls the teaching of Vatican One that from created things, God’s existence could be proved. It did not say it had been proved.
Such a high level of metaphysics fulfils Aristotle’s claim that we know when we now the cause. Put simply, we know when we can say ‘because’. The metaphysics that emerges would apply to any created universe. It is interesting that the Greeks so far as I know did not hold the idea of nothingness and creation very clearly. There was a tendency to think of the material order as eternal and the divine was at work helping the philosopher in his work. The idea of nothingness, creation and God comes from the faith perspective. False Gods are ‘not things’. Augustine (d. 430) is already clear. The matter is declared solemnly at the 4th Lateran Council (1215) ‘God made all things visible and invisible out of nothing’.
One realises, with a certain shock, that the ability to say ‘out of nothing, nothing comes’ could not have been said by the Jahwist theologian who composed Genesis II at the time of King Solomon. God fashioned everything. Bara, the word for creation, came from fashioning a quill pen. Our power of conception and expression is historically conditioned. We get enlightened by a genuine movement forward, Cardinal Newman’s ‘Development of Doctrine’. I think here it is helpful to recall Lonergan’s position that ideas have dates and history can be scientifically ordered. So, after the Lateran Council we find Aquinas making a clear distinction between essence and existence, things possible and things actual.
It remains that metaphysics belongs to this world as well as any possible world. Here it is more a matter of certain conclusions rather than of first principles. Such metaphysics Lonergan sees as arising from Cognitional Theory, Epistemology – and hence Metaphysics. He describes the three stages by three different questions. 1.) What do I do when I know? 2.) Why is doing that knowing? and 3.) What do I know when I do it?
He describes ‘Cognitional Theory’ as phenomenology, and so as a sort of description of what goes on, a description which is innocent of ‘epistemology’ and ‘metaphysics’, and so prepares the way all the more convincingly for these later achievements. Cognitional theory then is descriptive. All the data are given directly in consciousness. There are ‘states’ and ‘processions’, or for Thomistic ‘processions’ read ‘operations’. A state exists, but there is an incompletion about it, an emotional drive about it, which leads to an operation, and so a new state of consciousness.
Galileo, playing with his new telescope, looks at the moon and sees a pattern to each of the marks on it. Seeing is a state, seeing a pattern gives rise to a question, why are they similar? The question is an operation, it sets him thinking, where have I seen that pattern before? Thinking is not a matter of just looking but working with imagination. They could be volcanoes, they could be craters. His insight is one thing, and it is a further operation to express this insight, to put it into concepts and words. With the theory formulated, he looks through the telescope again. A further question is under way . . . does the data confirm my idea of craters? It does? Absolutely or very probably. A new conclusion is being born. Something similar happened with Archimedes as he played with a rubber duck in his bath and thought about King Hiero’s crown.
Cognitional theory thus gives states which emerge from the first state, sensation. The next state is a theory. the next state is the formulation of the theory. the next state is the assessment of the truth of the theory so formulated against the evidence which is re-examined. There are four states then, and three operations. The operations are wondering, moving to an expression and moving to a conclusion.
Cognitional theory involves personal work, thinking about ones own questions, theories and conclusions. I find humdrum things like bank accounts useful for one has a lively question! Every life moves between questions and answers. How is Freddy doing at school? Why was Mrs de Zuluetta not at church today? Cognitional theory is a matter of being able to recognise this happening again and again.
Epistemology builds upon the base of cognitional theory and asks ‘Why is doing that knowing?’ ‘Doing that’ is more than ‘taking a look’, for there is an interior build up of hypothesis, expression, conclusion, and of course, though I did not express it above, expression of conclusion. One might think knowing is really just taking a look or hearing about looks which other people have taken, for example in Australia. The world to be known is the world we see. But cognitional theory gives us things we can’t see, like the stirring in the mind of Galileo. Many philosophies, though, innocent of cognitional theory tend to the idea that knowing is just about seeing ‘the already out there now real world’.
Idealist philosophy takes the realm of theory as its object and somehow loses touch with ‘the real world’, so one can say that Kant lost the world in his sturdy. Cognitional theory though shows questions arising from the concrete and theory coming to answer questions about whatever, including the already, out there, now, real world.
When a whole lot of asteroids hit the moon, the moon did not know what was happening. the asteroids though left clues in the form of craters and so Galileo came up with a theory first, but the theory was so good that he came up with a conclusion that the theory was true. The conclusion is consciously in the mind of Galileo, but what has come to be known also lies beyond his mind. Asteroids did hit the moon in times past, and now it is also true that the fact has come to be known by the mind of man. Let us remind ourselves again, such advances have dates. If there is a metaphysics of physical facts there is also a metaphysics of meaning.
Metaphysics answers the question, ‘What do I know?’, and also of course, since each of us is very finite on history’s stage, ‘What do we know?’ Metaphysics deals with judgements which are sure and so irreversible. It may be helpful to note that in Christology, Lonergan, facing the Christ of History, Christ of Faith problem bases Christology on the claim, in New Testament document upon New Testament document, that Christ is ‘the Son of God’. From the faith of the early Church he is concerned to find a starting point which scholarship cannot overthrow. So there are various facts of history – William the Conqueror, Galileo and his telescope – which are simply known. They happened. So because of the war I do not recall meeting my father, but from countless evidences, I know he was my father. This is a more down to earth metaphysics than that which says correctly ‘out of nothing, nothing comes’.
It is true of course that much science and much history is hypothetical, so that Newton has somewhat given way to Einstein. I think though it is worth noting ‘irreversibles’, points where a true judgement has been made. So the world is much older than the Biblical account suggests. There are those who suggest that God could have created fossils etc. just to test the faith of his people. Alongside the fact that he is truthful, he shows himself on our side. I take the world of nature and its evidences as a created word of God, alongside the inspired world of God that is Sacred Scripture.
There are moments when ‘sciences’ arrive on the scene. So around 1230 Philip the Chancellor distinguished grace and nature, intellect and faith. For physics there is Newton; Chemistry, Mendeleef; Biology, Darwin; Psychology, Freud; History, Boeckh; and maybe for Economics, Lonergan, with his realisation that ‘the crossovers must equal. For philosophy too it is Lonergan who has completed the Copernican turn to the subject inadequately inaugurated by Descartes and by Kant. For Lonergan shows the subject as capable of affirmation of things human and divine and so capable of metaphysics and response to revealed religion.
Within each subject there are things which come to be known, things which are, even probabilities which are. With such affirmations man transcends himself in the sense he no longer lives simply in an animal habitat but in a universe which is known in some measure, and through history in increasing measure. Does anyone doubt Harvey’s circulation of the blood?
I think metaphysics could become a more popular term, for we are all metaphysical. There can be poor metaphysics and excellent metaphysics. the latter brings the human subject into the picture, whether it is Heraclitus pondering on conversation, the word, or Galileo looking at sunspots or Lonergan helping man to raise to something understood the operations and states we all experience but usually fail to bother to notice or understand.
Lonergan says something similar about evolution, ‘It is only the cause of the whole universe that from lower species can bring about the emergence of successive higher species.’ (Third Collection, 24) I don’t know what Hawkins would make of that – the point thought would remain that to prove God’s existence this way you would have to prove the evolution of species. One recalls the teaching of Vatican One that from created things, God’s existence could be proved. It did not say it had been proved.
Such a high level of metaphysics fulfils Aristotle’s claim that we know when we now the cause. Put simply, we know when we can say ‘because’. The metaphysics that emerges would apply to any created universe. It is interesting that the Greeks so far as I know did not hold the idea of nothingness and creation very clearly. There was a tendency to think of the material order as eternal and the divine was at work helping the philosopher in his work. The idea of nothingness, creation and God comes from the faith perspective. False Gods are ‘not things’. Augustine (d. 430) is already clear. The matter is declared solemnly at the 4th Lateran Council (1215) ‘God made all things visible and invisible out of nothing’.
One realises, with a certain shock, that the ability to say ‘out of nothing, nothing comes’ could not have been said by the Jahwist theologian who composed Genesis II at the time of King Solomon. God fashioned everything. Bara, the word for creation, came from fashioning a quill pen. Our power of conception and expression is historically conditioned. We get enlightened by a genuine movement forward, Cardinal Newman’s ‘Development of Doctrine’. I think here it is helpful to recall Lonergan’s position that ideas have dates and history can be scientifically ordered. So, after the Lateran Council we find Aquinas making a clear distinction between essence and existence, things possible and things actual.
It remains that metaphysics belongs to this world as well as any possible world. Here it is more a matter of certain conclusions rather than of first principles. Such metaphysics Lonergan sees as arising from Cognitional Theory, Epistemology – and hence Metaphysics. He describes the three stages by three different questions. 1.) What do I do when I know? 2.) Why is doing that knowing? and 3.) What do I know when I do it?
He describes ‘Cognitional Theory’ as phenomenology, and so as a sort of description of what goes on, a description which is innocent of ‘epistemology’ and ‘metaphysics’, and so prepares the way all the more convincingly for these later achievements. Cognitional theory then is descriptive. All the data are given directly in consciousness. There are ‘states’ and ‘processions’, or for Thomistic ‘processions’ read ‘operations’. A state exists, but there is an incompletion about it, an emotional drive about it, which leads to an operation, and so a new state of consciousness.
Galileo, playing with his new telescope, looks at the moon and sees a pattern to each of the marks on it. Seeing is a state, seeing a pattern gives rise to a question, why are they similar? The question is an operation, it sets him thinking, where have I seen that pattern before? Thinking is not a matter of just looking but working with imagination. They could be volcanoes, they could be craters. His insight is one thing, and it is a further operation to express this insight, to put it into concepts and words. With the theory formulated, he looks through the telescope again. A further question is under way . . . does the data confirm my idea of craters? It does? Absolutely or very probably. A new conclusion is being born. Something similar happened with Archimedes as he played with a rubber duck in his bath and thought about King Hiero’s crown.
Cognitional theory thus gives states which emerge from the first state, sensation. The next state is a theory. the next state is the formulation of the theory. the next state is the assessment of the truth of the theory so formulated against the evidence which is re-examined. There are four states then, and three operations. The operations are wondering, moving to an expression and moving to a conclusion.
Cognitional theory involves personal work, thinking about ones own questions, theories and conclusions. I find humdrum things like bank accounts useful for one has a lively question! Every life moves between questions and answers. How is Freddy doing at school? Why was Mrs de Zuluetta not at church today? Cognitional theory is a matter of being able to recognise this happening again and again.
Epistemology builds upon the base of cognitional theory and asks ‘Why is doing that knowing?’ ‘Doing that’ is more than ‘taking a look’, for there is an interior build up of hypothesis, expression, conclusion, and of course, though I did not express it above, expression of conclusion. One might think knowing is really just taking a look or hearing about looks which other people have taken, for example in Australia. The world to be known is the world we see. But cognitional theory gives us things we can’t see, like the stirring in the mind of Galileo. Many philosophies, though, innocent of cognitional theory tend to the idea that knowing is just about seeing ‘the already out there now real world’.
Idealist philosophy takes the realm of theory as its object and somehow loses touch with ‘the real world’, so one can say that Kant lost the world in his sturdy. Cognitional theory though shows questions arising from the concrete and theory coming to answer questions about whatever, including the already, out there, now, real world.
When a whole lot of asteroids hit the moon, the moon did not know what was happening. the asteroids though left clues in the form of craters and so Galileo came up with a theory first, but the theory was so good that he came up with a conclusion that the theory was true. The conclusion is consciously in the mind of Galileo, but what has come to be known also lies beyond his mind. Asteroids did hit the moon in times past, and now it is also true that the fact has come to be known by the mind of man. Let us remind ourselves again, such advances have dates. If there is a metaphysics of physical facts there is also a metaphysics of meaning.
Metaphysics answers the question, ‘What do I know?’, and also of course, since each of us is very finite on history’s stage, ‘What do we know?’ Metaphysics deals with judgements which are sure and so irreversible. It may be helpful to note that in Christology, Lonergan, facing the Christ of History, Christ of Faith problem bases Christology on the claim, in New Testament document upon New Testament document, that Christ is ‘the Son of God’. From the faith of the early Church he is concerned to find a starting point which scholarship cannot overthrow. So there are various facts of history – William the Conqueror, Galileo and his telescope – which are simply known. They happened. So because of the war I do not recall meeting my father, but from countless evidences, I know he was my father. This is a more down to earth metaphysics than that which says correctly ‘out of nothing, nothing comes’.
It is true of course that much science and much history is hypothetical, so that Newton has somewhat given way to Einstein. I think though it is worth noting ‘irreversibles’, points where a true judgement has been made. So the world is much older than the Biblical account suggests. There are those who suggest that God could have created fossils etc. just to test the faith of his people. Alongside the fact that he is truthful, he shows himself on our side. I take the world of nature and its evidences as a created word of God, alongside the inspired world of God that is Sacred Scripture.
There are moments when ‘sciences’ arrive on the scene. So around 1230 Philip the Chancellor distinguished grace and nature, intellect and faith. For physics there is Newton; Chemistry, Mendeleef; Biology, Darwin; Psychology, Freud; History, Boeckh; and maybe for Economics, Lonergan, with his realisation that ‘the crossovers must equal. For philosophy too it is Lonergan who has completed the Copernican turn to the subject inadequately inaugurated by Descartes and by Kant. For Lonergan shows the subject as capable of affirmation of things human and divine and so capable of metaphysics and response to revealed religion.
Within each subject there are things which come to be known, things which are, even probabilities which are. With such affirmations man transcends himself in the sense he no longer lives simply in an animal habitat but in a universe which is known in some measure, and through history in increasing measure. Does anyone doubt Harvey’s circulation of the blood?
I think metaphysics could become a more popular term, for we are all metaphysical. There can be poor metaphysics and excellent metaphysics. the latter brings the human subject into the picture, whether it is Heraclitus pondering on conversation, the word, or Galileo looking at sunspots or Lonergan helping man to raise to something understood the operations and states we all experience but usually fail to bother to notice or understand.
Wednesday 3 December 2008
Economic Supplement 6
An Advantage of the Credit Crunch
Until just recently it was possible to go down from Baliol or some such place, take a seat behind a computer, follow an elementary mathematical intelligence and go home with £300,000 a year and the prospect of bonuses. The life-style that emerged required continuing lavish support so the person was trapped. Hubris lead to nemesis. There are counsellors to help those who find life meaningless because they have achieved all their ambitions. The counsellors are employed of course to keep the poor saps working.
The credit crunch will mean it is not so easy to find a job and so one has to think about the matter. To be a slave of course is not to have a choice and the need for a wage for many has meant working down the mines or in the fields for a pittance.
Lonergan describes work in the economy as that by which man raises the potencies of nature to a standard of living, a flow of goods and services for households.
By work other things are done, households are made into homes, religious services are provided. Work has not only the potencies of nature to work upon but also, as it were, the potencies of grace.
A great theologian would point out that grace is always in act and the potencies are in the human side. There are though those created graces alongside supernatural graces. There is the humanity of the missionary. I love the story of the nun in near despair about Aids in Africa, who asked the children why they still believed in God after their parents had been taken from them. They replied, ‘Then God sent you to us.’ Her vocation was considerably strengthened.
W.S. Jevons humorously described religion as the ultimate trade in invisibles, but I think, though there is obviously an economic aspect, for churches must be built, it is good to recognise in the Church a motivation which is not economic, ‘a vocation’.
We pray ‘Send forth your Spirit and the face of the world will be renewed.’ We can see in the world’s troubles failures lay and clerical, so that hearts have failed to entwine, as Daniel O’Connell put it. May the credit crunch lead to much more ‘thinking things through’ so that there may be a greater flow of divine ‘services and goods’.
More prosaically we should work to encourage the young about their options. I have been talking to a 15 year old whose vocational aspiration is to be a hairdresser. Now I have nothing against hairdressers if they manage to tidy me up and leave my locks almost as flowing as when I went in. They deserve a tip. My psychology retains equipoise. It is important work they do. When though I suggested the young lady might be a nurse, she was taken by the idea, but explained she could never get the qualifications needed. I asked a senior parishioner, a nurse, what these might be. She said maths (so you could give correct dosages) and biology (so you had some idea of what was going on). So I have urged the young lady to attend to maths and biology. Could anything be better than a good nurse as you face vital problems?
I notice that qualifications have entered upon the scenario of religious life. Everyone must have A Levels to be a nun. Such religious orders may be missing out on a richer future.
Until just recently it was possible to go down from Baliol or some such place, take a seat behind a computer, follow an elementary mathematical intelligence and go home with £300,000 a year and the prospect of bonuses. The life-style that emerged required continuing lavish support so the person was trapped. Hubris lead to nemesis. There are counsellors to help those who find life meaningless because they have achieved all their ambitions. The counsellors are employed of course to keep the poor saps working.
The credit crunch will mean it is not so easy to find a job and so one has to think about the matter. To be a slave of course is not to have a choice and the need for a wage for many has meant working down the mines or in the fields for a pittance.
Lonergan describes work in the economy as that by which man raises the potencies of nature to a standard of living, a flow of goods and services for households.
By work other things are done, households are made into homes, religious services are provided. Work has not only the potencies of nature to work upon but also, as it were, the potencies of grace.
A great theologian would point out that grace is always in act and the potencies are in the human side. There are though those created graces alongside supernatural graces. There is the humanity of the missionary. I love the story of the nun in near despair about Aids in Africa, who asked the children why they still believed in God after their parents had been taken from them. They replied, ‘Then God sent you to us.’ Her vocation was considerably strengthened.
W.S. Jevons humorously described religion as the ultimate trade in invisibles, but I think, though there is obviously an economic aspect, for churches must be built, it is good to recognise in the Church a motivation which is not economic, ‘a vocation’.
We pray ‘Send forth your Spirit and the face of the world will be renewed.’ We can see in the world’s troubles failures lay and clerical, so that hearts have failed to entwine, as Daniel O’Connell put it. May the credit crunch lead to much more ‘thinking things through’ so that there may be a greater flow of divine ‘services and goods’.
More prosaically we should work to encourage the young about their options. I have been talking to a 15 year old whose vocational aspiration is to be a hairdresser. Now I have nothing against hairdressers if they manage to tidy me up and leave my locks almost as flowing as when I went in. They deserve a tip. My psychology retains equipoise. It is important work they do. When though I suggested the young lady might be a nurse, she was taken by the idea, but explained she could never get the qualifications needed. I asked a senior parishioner, a nurse, what these might be. She said maths (so you could give correct dosages) and biology (so you had some idea of what was going on). So I have urged the young lady to attend to maths and biology. Could anything be better than a good nurse as you face vital problems?
I notice that qualifications have entered upon the scenario of religious life. Everyone must have A Levels to be a nun. Such religious orders may be missing out on a richer future.
The Polyphony of Consciousness
Religious experience is a normal part of the polyphony of consciousness, even though it is not a natural but a supernatural element.
Mounier said man is naturally artificial. One could echo that by saying man is normally religious. So, little children from any background can be helped to pray. It is also true of course that in a very secular culture the average person may have repressed the religious element in life, a repression they could be brought to talk about, something they ‘register’.
Religious consciousness is an element of conscious experience which along with other experiences forms the substructure of our human being. Substructural elements can give rise to a superstructure where what is experienced is also named and placed in the horizon of what a person knows, in the sense of being able to talk about the matter. So one first experiences and then comes to name the colour blue.
If one can talk about something there can be development in the way of understanding and intentionality. To describe something as substructural is not to disparage it. In the religious experience there is direct access to God who is love, and there is no more important reality for man.
It is through the power of naming things and through discourse, through the word in that sense, that we can consider things, draw on our human traditions, criticise our personal conduct, and declare the truth. ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one God’ is a declaration in language calling everyone to reassess their priorities. It is through such words at the level of superstructure at the level of culture that people learn they should be converted. Something they have been neglecting, something they have forgotten about, something even they have repressed belongs to them in a sense, and is what is most important.
Lonergan uses the word luminous, light bearing, and I think we can take it that he is referring to something within consciousness itself. At a substructural level there are many elements. I am aware that it is a wet day and conscious that my options are thereby limited. I am aware of a pile of papers and conscious that I have things I must deal with. I am aware of divine office to be said and conscious I must fit it in before the end of the day. I am aware that my diary is free and conscious perhaps of a slight disappointment that the wide world does not need me today. I am using ‘awareness’ and ‘consciousness’ as a sort of duo. My being is being in the world and of that I am aware as a starter. From that my consciousness takes shape. Lonergan has being aware that the window is open and being conscious that I am about to sneeze. Consciousness is the interior state. This is the inner room where I may enter and realise that beyond windows open, beyond piles of paper, beyond the state of the weather, God is present and God is all.
I am playing around with the terms awareness and consciousness, for our being is being in the world of which we are aware and our consciousness has the power to shift us to new realms of conscious awareness. Our conscious awareness is not only of the already out there now but it can become of the already out there now then. Lonergan has made us conscious and aware of the transforming power a question can have upon consciousness and how through memory, through attention to new data, how through the formation of schematic images insights may arise which intimate the possibility of a new grasp on reality. Our movement forward is not merely contemplative.
Contemplation though is truly luminous in that our consciousness becomes aware of reality in the light of understanding. So great an achievement is this that for centuries this was conceived as the goal and so the luminousness sought was the mind in possession of the truth which lay beyond it and in that light, going beyond all creatures, one could and one can find God in the cloud of unknowing. From such awareness came the vast achievement of monastic life, from say 450AD to 1450AD.
Of course to achieve contemplative awareness requires considerable effort, and so the monks built everything around that goal, with personal silence and with readings secular and religious. Almost without realising it, the monks by their evangelisation and agriculture were changing the world.
What makes the modern world modern is the awareness that man has the power to develop things. St Ignatius of Loyola wrote, ‘When you pray, pray as if it all depends on God. When you work, work as if it all depends on you’. What makes the modern world so futile is the introduction of individualism into the scenario, so that unless we are coerced by needed wages or enticed by bonuses we do not know the secret of collaboration with others in obedience and friendship. There has been a crisis in the Congo at the time of writing. I was very proud to be able to take a second collection for the people there using the agency of CAFOD. Such a capacity though belongs to the parish precisely because it is got together.
Luminosity belongs not just to contemplation but to constructive action. Action can be carried out and seen by others. It involves a certain self forgetting and the finding of a new self. The letting go of self forgetting can help one overcome bad habits.
The priest or extraordinary minister who takes the Blessed Sacrament to the sick tries to recollect what he or she is doing. Action though is demanding of our whole attention. So St Ignatius said, ‘when you work, work as if it all depends on you’. We need though to bring love to our work or it will be loveless. Perhaps we can reverse St Augustine’s ‘when you love look to the source of your love and you will find God’, so that we may say ‘bring the love of God into your work so that in all your encounters you show appropriate loving affection’. This perhaps is what Our Lord means when he would have us ‘dressed for action’ or when he says that not only will we be in him, but he will be in us.
Mounier said man is naturally artificial. One could echo that by saying man is normally religious. So, little children from any background can be helped to pray. It is also true of course that in a very secular culture the average person may have repressed the religious element in life, a repression they could be brought to talk about, something they ‘register’.
Religious consciousness is an element of conscious experience which along with other experiences forms the substructure of our human being. Substructural elements can give rise to a superstructure where what is experienced is also named and placed in the horizon of what a person knows, in the sense of being able to talk about the matter. So one first experiences and then comes to name the colour blue.
If one can talk about something there can be development in the way of understanding and intentionality. To describe something as substructural is not to disparage it. In the religious experience there is direct access to God who is love, and there is no more important reality for man.
It is through the power of naming things and through discourse, through the word in that sense, that we can consider things, draw on our human traditions, criticise our personal conduct, and declare the truth. ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one God’ is a declaration in language calling everyone to reassess their priorities. It is through such words at the level of superstructure at the level of culture that people learn they should be converted. Something they have been neglecting, something they have forgotten about, something even they have repressed belongs to them in a sense, and is what is most important.
Lonergan uses the word luminous, light bearing, and I think we can take it that he is referring to something within consciousness itself. At a substructural level there are many elements. I am aware that it is a wet day and conscious that my options are thereby limited. I am aware of a pile of papers and conscious that I have things I must deal with. I am aware of divine office to be said and conscious I must fit it in before the end of the day. I am aware that my diary is free and conscious perhaps of a slight disappointment that the wide world does not need me today. I am using ‘awareness’ and ‘consciousness’ as a sort of duo. My being is being in the world and of that I am aware as a starter. From that my consciousness takes shape. Lonergan has being aware that the window is open and being conscious that I am about to sneeze. Consciousness is the interior state. This is the inner room where I may enter and realise that beyond windows open, beyond piles of paper, beyond the state of the weather, God is present and God is all.
I am playing around with the terms awareness and consciousness, for our being is being in the world of which we are aware and our consciousness has the power to shift us to new realms of conscious awareness. Our conscious awareness is not only of the already out there now but it can become of the already out there now then. Lonergan has made us conscious and aware of the transforming power a question can have upon consciousness and how through memory, through attention to new data, how through the formation of schematic images insights may arise which intimate the possibility of a new grasp on reality. Our movement forward is not merely contemplative.
Contemplation though is truly luminous in that our consciousness becomes aware of reality in the light of understanding. So great an achievement is this that for centuries this was conceived as the goal and so the luminousness sought was the mind in possession of the truth which lay beyond it and in that light, going beyond all creatures, one could and one can find God in the cloud of unknowing. From such awareness came the vast achievement of monastic life, from say 450AD to 1450AD.
Of course to achieve contemplative awareness requires considerable effort, and so the monks built everything around that goal, with personal silence and with readings secular and religious. Almost without realising it, the monks by their evangelisation and agriculture were changing the world.
What makes the modern world modern is the awareness that man has the power to develop things. St Ignatius of Loyola wrote, ‘When you pray, pray as if it all depends on God. When you work, work as if it all depends on you’. What makes the modern world so futile is the introduction of individualism into the scenario, so that unless we are coerced by needed wages or enticed by bonuses we do not know the secret of collaboration with others in obedience and friendship. There has been a crisis in the Congo at the time of writing. I was very proud to be able to take a second collection for the people there using the agency of CAFOD. Such a capacity though belongs to the parish precisely because it is got together.
Luminosity belongs not just to contemplation but to constructive action. Action can be carried out and seen by others. It involves a certain self forgetting and the finding of a new self. The letting go of self forgetting can help one overcome bad habits.
The priest or extraordinary minister who takes the Blessed Sacrament to the sick tries to recollect what he or she is doing. Action though is demanding of our whole attention. So St Ignatius said, ‘when you work, work as if it all depends on you’. We need though to bring love to our work or it will be loveless. Perhaps we can reverse St Augustine’s ‘when you love look to the source of your love and you will find God’, so that we may say ‘bring the love of God into your work so that in all your encounters you show appropriate loving affection’. This perhaps is what Our Lord means when he would have us ‘dressed for action’ or when he says that not only will we be in him, but he will be in us.
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