The idea of self appropriation is that intellect should be able to note itself in its different operations and become as familiar with them as we are with seeing when we open our eyes in daytime. The idea is that consciousness might be conscious of itself in a full way. By contrast would be the approach which thought that everything should be understood by studying the brain, with consciousness being indicated by a certain measureable sort of brain activity, valuable as such an approach might be.
To man belongs animal extroversion and the fringe of intelligence found in animals. So we move to the shade when it is too hot. There is pleasure and pain. This is the world of the nursery but it stays with us throughout life, for the most part helping us but also sometimes leading us astray. It is helpful to recall this basic level, for it is constantly operative. Without it scientists could not measure, historians could not read, artists could not paint and philosophers could not learn or communicate. Without it, the vast world of commonsense could not operate technology, make a living, or promote justice and welfare. So important is this world that one might imagine the only task of intellect is to see that things are working – this would be the pragmatic philosophy. David Hume tends to confine us to this world. It is the world most men live in most of the time it seems to them, though there may be a tinge of respect for science or religion.
In fact, the normal experience of man is to learn a language and move into a world which is wider and deeper than the world of animal extroversion. In the world mediated to us by meaning not everything can be seen, and though imagination may try to escort everything, it falters at mathematical infinity or for that matter, at geological time spans.
The world into which we grow up is mediated by meaning, motivated by value, charged with feeling. We are enormously shaped by a people we come to belong to, usually so that we should be upright and useful citizens, and sanctioning and encouraging our development there may be a religious tradition. Belief plays a huge part in this appropriation, and we cannot possibly verify everything we come to believe concerning fiction and history, science and philosophy, religion and morals.
In addition to the world of animal extroversion, we move into a world of truth and being, where truth in the mind corresponds with reality lying usually beyond the mind. To some sorts of truth, generalisation belongs – so the heartbeat causes circulation of the blood in all bodies- while other truths are unique, so William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066. Self appropriation is to do with noticing and understanding one’s own cognitional operations. Similarly, we find here that some things are generalisations and some things belong to us alone. So we all have questions from time to time – it is a general state of affairs like the heartbeat – but coming to dedicate our life in love is usually a unique story I imagine.
Animals have sorts of questions belonging to their extroversion – which way did the fox go? – but most human questioning goes on in a thought process which has become interior, so that we think using words, concepts, and images trying to find the answer to our question. Aquinas refers to “phantasm” and Lonergan to “schematic image” as part of the matter being used when we have a question.
Perhaps it is helpful to distinguish phantasm and schematic image in the following way. Phantasm provides us with all the materials which might be helpful in answering the question and we work on them, dismissing this, focussing on that until we find a perspective which is illuminating and which gives an insight which might be helpful. The perspective which is illuminating is the schematic image. The Greeks realised that diagrams were helpful. I think it was Socrates who asked a child to double a square but the child’s efforts produced four squares because he doubled each side. There was a person who wondered why the car wouldn’t start when the garage had checked everything. Attention focussed on the key. A different key had been used. I would love to know how to irrevocably evangelise England anew, and through England, pioneer in so many things, the world, but here is a question so huge that in each generation one can only add a mite to the solution. I recall recusant Catholics who found their way forward was “to show charity to their non-Catholic neighbours”. There are questions to which you do not have the complete answer.
Insight though might yield several different possible answers to a question. If it is a question about ontology, there is only one possible answer. If it is about conduct there may be several answers of increasing difficulty. I think an element here is that the more heroic path may have a greater risk of failure because of weakness. So St Thomas More decided not to be a priest for some reason (perhaps there is more than one reason?!) he felt attracted to marriage. This was a way forward he thought he had the grace to carry out.
I have been piling three intellectual levels together. One is the level of question and possible answer. So a possible answer to doubling the square is to double the sides. The next is the level of answers which are sure, in which the true judgement gives one a hold on reality. The next is the level of answers which relate to conduct – what should I do?
The modern world relates closely to the third level, but without the second level, so that charismatic, loving, and affectionate people would guide the world forward with an enthusiasm which blinds them to the importance of truth and reality. For such questions take one into the philosophic miasma. That miasma has to deal with modern science and modern history. It brings in thought in a heavy and life demanding way. So easily it is dismissed. All you need is goodness, all you need is love. If a person is brought to you in the jungle with appendicitis, certain medical knowledge and skill would assist love to express itself, but it is to be acquired only through a process of training.
In ordinary language, idealism is what belongs to youth before a cynical realism breaks in on one’s living. In philosophic terminology, idealism is the idea that there is the life of the mind, there are meanings and values man cares for, but they are not related to reality since what is real lies beyond us. Critical realism is the position that we can know what is real. It sees in scientific truth sometimes the absolute attainment of truth and sometimes an asymptotic approach to the truth. Science is espoused in its positions and developments, and history in its succession of narratives. Certain absolutes are attained in the process of self appropriation including the capacity to be absolutely certain.
This then is human nature with the precepts to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible. Providence places human nature in the context of a love which coming from God raises the whole level of meaning and value. Stirred by such love, the individual and the group must account for it and keep it alive. Theology is thus reflection on conversion, but it is this reflection going on in a new context. So in 1800, before the geologists, no one guessed at the age of the earth. The new idea emerging raises huge questions about the Bible and its Babylonian cosmology. With the benefit of a certain hindsight, one can say that the written Word of God is concerned with revelation, with giving to man a revelation which he could not attain by his own natural powers. So we praise three persons in one God, Father, Son, and Spirit.
Saturday 19 September 2009
Determinism and Freedom
Our culture is rightly massively influenced by science, but the scientific outlook is easily a deterministic one, for every atom follows Newton’s exact laws expressed by the equation F=MA. It was argued that if you knew the exact situation at one time you could predict any subsequent situation. Obviously, since a person is made up of atoms, personal conduct, though it gives the illusion of freedom and responsibility, must also be determined by atomic masses and forces.
If you read the last chapter of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, you find the same determinism controlling human life, despite the fact that he has portrayed the heights and the depths of human life and love, with characters like Pierre and Natasha.
Obviously the idea of such determinism is fatal for the religious outlook, or for that matter, for a humanist outlook which has a concern for rights and duties. A community massively influenced by the scientific outlook needs also to be massively influenced by the religious outlook, but how is this possible? One can see a task here for philosophy.
I recall solving the problem for myself by what I called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. I noticed that Christianity could not get along without simple things like bread, wine, and water. These things I saw as things to be understood in their own right and used appropriately. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness was to see atoms as the only real things. I granted that any material thing could be broken down into the atoms which composed it but I did not grant that the atoms could tell you everything about bread or for that matter about man.
I realised that I was affirming the commonsense world as a sort of starting point and I realised that science itself depended on commonsense as well, as when a chemist picks up a pipette for example.
I was helped further by the Aristotelian and Thomism philosophy of matter and form. Prime matter is potency to form. Every material existent is formed. Form has to take account of underlying matter. So it occurred to me that every atom was formed, and so it was unlikely that each atom was identical with another, any more than snowflakes are identical. There was a Catholic philosopher, Donceel, who claimed God could not put a human soul into a cow, because the matter was not suitably formed. I suppose this idea gets rid of the Hindu idea that we might in the next life come back as a snake or a dog, but it raises questions about the degree of formation needed for the information of a human soul. Back in the 1960s, before abortion had become legal, it seemed possible to consider various stages before the infusion of a soul. I suppose one could argue on the one hand that a cow’s brain was not capable of rational thought, but that the human fertilised embryo, though not yet conscious, is capable of developing a brain capable of rational thought. What you have then is not a potential human being but a human being in potential (as we all are in deep sleep).
Lonergan is a Thomist, but he works up to the matter form position using classical science with its rules and also using statistical theory, probability theory. Indeed, he calls the position he arrives at “emergent probability” which he equates with divine providence.
He would point out that even in a laboratory there are alien influences. The measurements taken do not make an exact line. The arrival of probability theory gives one more knowledge, not less. So one knows that an asteroid follows closely Newton’s laws, but if you want to know the chance of a large asteroid hitting the earth in this decade you need to study the past and see with what frequency they have done so in previous centuries. Probability theory is not a cloak for ignorance. Rather it extends knowledge.
If you throw a dice six times and you get six sixes, you will be suspicious that it is weighted. If you throw it 100 times and get 100 sixes, you will know something unusual is going on.
If you have a chemical environment with many different complex carbon based molecules, you will occasionally get the same complex molecule again. If though you get a molecule nourishing itself, using a digestive system and then dividing itself, something different is going on. You have got a new sort of thing, more stable, always there.
If by a Canon of Parsimony you confine yourself simply to the empirical evidence, then what you have is the emergence of something unexpected, something prepared for by the previous situation, but something one would describe as biological rather than chemical. If at an earlier stage of things one had been able to observe a total set of subatomic particles assembling themselves into atoms, one would be able to observe that they formed themselves according to MendAlien subsequent table. Stage A is observable; Stage B is observable, and by insight one can explain what makes Stage B so different from Stage A. The Canon of Parsimony confines the empirical scientist to describing what he can observe and explaining what he observes. What is to be observed is the arrival of new realities on the stage; the stage thereby is changed, and further realities are enabled to emerge. Such emergence has a probability because it happens again and again and such emergencies going on again and again have led to our commonsense world with its bread, wine, and water, but without water you would not have bread or wine.
I met a scientist who was describing how an embryo grows. Suddenly an arm begins to emerge. He described the wonder of it by saying form appears to precede matter. Since it happens again and again there is a probability of it. What happens is not predictable simply from the material substrate.
What emerges are not just new species but a new environment containing many species in the interdependence that constitutes an ecology in which each finds a supporting environment. The scientist can anticipate the emergence. The theologian sees the finger of God and the introduction of new forms. There are schemes of recurrence of the pattern if A then B, if B then C, and if C then A, so if parents then children, if children then growing up, if growing up then parents.
The same probable emergence of new schemes of recurrence goes on in human life, so for example, if fish then fishing, if fishing then nets, if nets then boats, if boats then plenty of fish, if plenty of fish, population growth. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. So the materials for Newton were prepared by Galileo and others. So there is emergent probability working in philosophy as well as in science and since we must see the finger of God in emergent probability, we must anticipate emergent probability in the Church as well. Does this mean we anticipate a new saint – or perhaps something more like a new ecology, so that a richer supportive environment comes about for many?
Contrasted with my early claim of misplaced concreteness, the theory of emergent probability is at home in our modern world with its awareness of the long term evolution which has gone on in the physical environment (de Chardin’s Cosmogenesis) and the development in man’s world through historical process (anthropogenesis). While one might posit emergent probability in general communication going on between God and Man – “in many and various ways God spoke to our ancestors” - I think that with the Christian mystery we have to speak directly of Providence for we are called by Christ to faith, but we find in the Church a “scheme of recurrence”, - the Sacramental system, and we find the emergence of a new order of affairs marked by the fruits of the Spirit – “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self control”. There is ever a rich environment for a new generation of faith.
If philosophical achievement has led through emergent probability to the possibility of a philosophy of philosophies this might allow the emergence of a theology of theologies. For God would speak with commonsense consciousness in all its varieties, but also with differentiated consciousness, whether scientific, scholarly, artistic, or philosophic. Faith is a common assent. The rich responses made need to speak to each other and support each other including, of course, the assent made by the successor of St Peter.
If you read the last chapter of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, you find the same determinism controlling human life, despite the fact that he has portrayed the heights and the depths of human life and love, with characters like Pierre and Natasha.
Obviously the idea of such determinism is fatal for the religious outlook, or for that matter, for a humanist outlook which has a concern for rights and duties. A community massively influenced by the scientific outlook needs also to be massively influenced by the religious outlook, but how is this possible? One can see a task here for philosophy.
I recall solving the problem for myself by what I called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. I noticed that Christianity could not get along without simple things like bread, wine, and water. These things I saw as things to be understood in their own right and used appropriately. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness was to see atoms as the only real things. I granted that any material thing could be broken down into the atoms which composed it but I did not grant that the atoms could tell you everything about bread or for that matter about man.
I realised that I was affirming the commonsense world as a sort of starting point and I realised that science itself depended on commonsense as well, as when a chemist picks up a pipette for example.
I was helped further by the Aristotelian and Thomism philosophy of matter and form. Prime matter is potency to form. Every material existent is formed. Form has to take account of underlying matter. So it occurred to me that every atom was formed, and so it was unlikely that each atom was identical with another, any more than snowflakes are identical. There was a Catholic philosopher, Donceel, who claimed God could not put a human soul into a cow, because the matter was not suitably formed. I suppose this idea gets rid of the Hindu idea that we might in the next life come back as a snake or a dog, but it raises questions about the degree of formation needed for the information of a human soul. Back in the 1960s, before abortion had become legal, it seemed possible to consider various stages before the infusion of a soul. I suppose one could argue on the one hand that a cow’s brain was not capable of rational thought, but that the human fertilised embryo, though not yet conscious, is capable of developing a brain capable of rational thought. What you have then is not a potential human being but a human being in potential (as we all are in deep sleep).
Lonergan is a Thomist, but he works up to the matter form position using classical science with its rules and also using statistical theory, probability theory. Indeed, he calls the position he arrives at “emergent probability” which he equates with divine providence.
He would point out that even in a laboratory there are alien influences. The measurements taken do not make an exact line. The arrival of probability theory gives one more knowledge, not less. So one knows that an asteroid follows closely Newton’s laws, but if you want to know the chance of a large asteroid hitting the earth in this decade you need to study the past and see with what frequency they have done so in previous centuries. Probability theory is not a cloak for ignorance. Rather it extends knowledge.
If you throw a dice six times and you get six sixes, you will be suspicious that it is weighted. If you throw it 100 times and get 100 sixes, you will know something unusual is going on.
If you have a chemical environment with many different complex carbon based molecules, you will occasionally get the same complex molecule again. If though you get a molecule nourishing itself, using a digestive system and then dividing itself, something different is going on. You have got a new sort of thing, more stable, always there.
If by a Canon of Parsimony you confine yourself simply to the empirical evidence, then what you have is the emergence of something unexpected, something prepared for by the previous situation, but something one would describe as biological rather than chemical. If at an earlier stage of things one had been able to observe a total set of subatomic particles assembling themselves into atoms, one would be able to observe that they formed themselves according to MendAlien subsequent table. Stage A is observable; Stage B is observable, and by insight one can explain what makes Stage B so different from Stage A. The Canon of Parsimony confines the empirical scientist to describing what he can observe and explaining what he observes. What is to be observed is the arrival of new realities on the stage; the stage thereby is changed, and further realities are enabled to emerge. Such emergence has a probability because it happens again and again and such emergencies going on again and again have led to our commonsense world with its bread, wine, and water, but without water you would not have bread or wine.
I met a scientist who was describing how an embryo grows. Suddenly an arm begins to emerge. He described the wonder of it by saying form appears to precede matter. Since it happens again and again there is a probability of it. What happens is not predictable simply from the material substrate.
What emerges are not just new species but a new environment containing many species in the interdependence that constitutes an ecology in which each finds a supporting environment. The scientist can anticipate the emergence. The theologian sees the finger of God and the introduction of new forms. There are schemes of recurrence of the pattern if A then B, if B then C, and if C then A, so if parents then children, if children then growing up, if growing up then parents.
The same probable emergence of new schemes of recurrence goes on in human life, so for example, if fish then fishing, if fishing then nets, if nets then boats, if boats then plenty of fish, if plenty of fish, population growth. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. So the materials for Newton were prepared by Galileo and others. So there is emergent probability working in philosophy as well as in science and since we must see the finger of God in emergent probability, we must anticipate emergent probability in the Church as well. Does this mean we anticipate a new saint – or perhaps something more like a new ecology, so that a richer supportive environment comes about for many?
Contrasted with my early claim of misplaced concreteness, the theory of emergent probability is at home in our modern world with its awareness of the long term evolution which has gone on in the physical environment (de Chardin’s Cosmogenesis) and the development in man’s world through historical process (anthropogenesis). While one might posit emergent probability in general communication going on between God and Man – “in many and various ways God spoke to our ancestors” - I think that with the Christian mystery we have to speak directly of Providence for we are called by Christ to faith, but we find in the Church a “scheme of recurrence”, - the Sacramental system, and we find the emergence of a new order of affairs marked by the fruits of the Spirit – “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self control”. There is ever a rich environment for a new generation of faith.
If philosophical achievement has led through emergent probability to the possibility of a philosophy of philosophies this might allow the emergence of a theology of theologies. For God would speak with commonsense consciousness in all its varieties, but also with differentiated consciousness, whether scientific, scholarly, artistic, or philosophic. Faith is a common assent. The rich responses made need to speak to each other and support each other including, of course, the assent made by the successor of St Peter.
Tuesday 30 June 2009
The Contemporary Task of Philosophy
The world we live in is described as modern, or sometimes post modern. It has an expanding population of six billion needing to be clothed and fed, and ecology in need of greater care in countless ways. Not only common sense but technical expertise is needed to keep everything running.
Behind the world of technical expertise is an ongoing world of scientific discovery which leaps forward remarkably. There is also an ongoing world of historical, sociological, and psychological scholarships which deals with what has stirred man in various ways at various times and places. Religion could be subsumed under religious studies here, so that it might become a matter once vital for various peoples, but now fading away.
Or it should be noticed that for some, religion is alive and well and a vital matter in personal and group contact. So we find, beyond the common sense world, a world of science, scholarship, and religion. Keats wrote “Ever let the fancy roam, pleasure never is at home” and in the roaming of fancy we find the realm of art, which can bring refreshment to the human spirit.
Human meanings develop in collaboration so we find developments in science, scholarship, religion, and art. The creation of terminology belongs to the group so we witness a Tower of Babel effect, wherein scientists live in one theoretical world, scholars another, religious people another and artistic people another and the idea that there should be some sort of communication which runs across these developing areas seems impossible.
Philosophy produces different stances. Some think that the only truth lies with empirical science and so the age of philosophy is over. Or some think its purpose is to chart the different meanings of terms as they are used in ordinary speech. Some think human studies should be value free whereas others are open to values so long as God is excluded. The phenomenologists would describe and the existentialists decide. Is there some way of bringing the philosophical world together so that it can address the world we find with its huge tasks and its specialised developments?
The recognition that there are different sorts of norms to be recognised in different sorts of activities is perhaps a starting point. So if you are riding in a bike race you need to look to your diet, or you won’t have enough energy. If you are looking after children, there are again norms about diet and also about conduct. The children might set the house on fire. There are norms around what it is to be a responsible parent. A failure to fulfil responsible norms which one recognises leads to a feeling of guilt.
So, according to one’s goal an appropriate norm is to attend to the data. If you are a bank clerk, you should count the notes in the wad carefully, but if you are a painter, you should note how the sunlight falls on the wad. We all live in the same world but we notice things differently according to the purposes which occupy us, “our memories, associations, a structure and one’s emotive and expressive reactions”. Sensation is rarely just raw sensation but rather a perception of some sort, and the perception to be worthy needs according to one’s purpose, to fulfil certain norms.
So sometimes I set myself the task of doing some reading, but sometimes I find I am quite distracted so that as the words pass before my eyes, I find I am not there, I am somewhere else. I have a choice – somehow to recall myself to the task in hand, or set myself the different task of finding out what it is that is occupying me, and preoccupying me. To read without taking in what is said, fails to fulfil the norm ”be attentive”.
One might say that the norm of being attentive is purely subjective, but if a painter only occasionally noticed the little matter of light and shade, his colleagues and critics would point out the fact and make him aware that his subjective fault had an objective set of consequences which, attended to, would bring him round to a better performance. I think one can see that in the scientific world and the scholarly world, the example of others and their advice helps subjectively to attain a better standard, to recognise the norms of subjectivity.
In a social discipline such as science, one can recognise the influence of others, but it is perhaps not out of place to note the development from the id to the ego, from the ego to the self, and from the self to the affirmation of individual identity. The id is the subconscious ordination to pleasure, survival and procreation and so the source of instinctual unfolding. The ego is that unfolding coming under the influence of archetypes which are sociologically carried. There are things appropriate for a boy or for a girl. Sex is here an archetypal controller. Or “Every little boy or girl that’s born alive is either a little Liberal or a Conservative”. I heard of a little boy wild about dressing up, and I felt sorry for him, for somehow the archetype had not been communicated through the subtle world of praise and blame. The ego then is shaped by archetypes. Imagine a little king – everyone should bow to him! The ego could rule a life, but the emergence of the self is something different. The self has projects and sacrifices to make to bring an achievement to fruition. It takes its cue from the world it finds and the opportunities presented. A sense of identity may be achieved and a reputation established. The affirmation of identity is not just a matter of the present and the future, but also of the past. I am the same one who has passed through infancy, the carelessness of schooldays, the discipline of study, a marriage, successful or not etc, etc. Potencies have been unfolding, but all along the same one has been engaged. There have been mistakes – I bear the scars. There have been sins – there is the task of repentance and reparation. There is the dawn of holiness. I recognise this identical self in its development is set for eternity.
So man inescapably finds himself set in a religious context. Facing fearsome problems in time one may seek to escape but can you escape from being the self that you are? Religion brings a transformation of that self to a self that is loved and, through the vicissitudes of life, learning to love. The transformation, so full of meaning, gives rise to a further specialisation as it is reflected upon, so in addition to commonsense, science, scholarships and art, we find theology, resulting from “in loveness” dominating the meaning of life.
If one remains with the scholastics and the priority of metaphysics, then one would be able to conclude that the supernatural infinitely outweighs the natural. The natural is its own order, but the supernatural is the middle ground between infinite divinity and mortal and indeed sinful humanity. There is upon man, the endless task of conversion from a simply natural set of demands to the demands and gifts of God Himself, whose ways are not our ways.
If one shifts from the metaphysical outlook, which gives one first, principles from which to make valid deductions, to the outlook which recognises the human subject himself in his authentic recognition of the norms governing subjectivity, then the infinite outweighing of the natural by the supernatural becomes the fact that it is love and God’s love that gives meaning to one’s life and there is nothing else, even a metaphysical first principle, that can outweigh the existential fact.
Such a realisation is not automatically matched by a flawless performance, for life has many demands and distractions and so the love of God when realised, sets in motion a process of conversion lasting over a lifetime in which the gift of love is more profoundly acknowledged and more efficaciously responded to. One can blandly say that washing up is part of God’s will but one’s motivation easily descends to the pragmatic, whereas conversion is concerned with that motivation as consciously moving. There is then, a luminous intensification possible and monastic life might help it. Intensification is a taking thought, a getting interested, a gaining of insights and a context in which to express them, a coalescence of insights so that a person’s inner structure develops and changes moving towards Christian, or other religious maturity in a development which may be experienced as crushingly slow. Still, understanding does develop and moves towards fullness as it embraces in the mystery but increasingly clearly all that God has made and plans. With concern for one’s development, others and the world a clear moral dimension emerges. Concern with values and the invisible ground of love brings awareness of the potency of mind and so also an intellectual conversion.
A metaphysical analysis reveals the mind as capax omnia, as unlimited in its scope but awareness of the priority of love gives mind its task in discerning the right order of things against “all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men”, and so the task of overcoming evil with good and lies with truth. The world is in greater measure than one realises, a conspiracy which consents to evil.
The spirit blows where it will. The above analysis is derived from a Christian context, of course, but is philosophical rather than theological and so might be acceptable to any person of a different tradition. It shows philosophy to be not just the love of wisdom, but the wisdom which acknowledges its grounding in love. It is a wisdom which recognises subjective norms, which are objective and binding and shows such norms to exist where consciousness is differentiated scientifically, in a scholarly way; in an artistic way; in a religious way and indeed, in a philosophical way which is authentic and recognises norms arising from consciousness itself. So there is a norm not to waste one’s life sleeping!
Behind the world of technical expertise is an ongoing world of scientific discovery which leaps forward remarkably. There is also an ongoing world of historical, sociological, and psychological scholarships which deals with what has stirred man in various ways at various times and places. Religion could be subsumed under religious studies here, so that it might become a matter once vital for various peoples, but now fading away.
Or it should be noticed that for some, religion is alive and well and a vital matter in personal and group contact. So we find, beyond the common sense world, a world of science, scholarship, and religion. Keats wrote “Ever let the fancy roam, pleasure never is at home” and in the roaming of fancy we find the realm of art, which can bring refreshment to the human spirit.
Human meanings develop in collaboration so we find developments in science, scholarship, religion, and art. The creation of terminology belongs to the group so we witness a Tower of Babel effect, wherein scientists live in one theoretical world, scholars another, religious people another and artistic people another and the idea that there should be some sort of communication which runs across these developing areas seems impossible.
Philosophy produces different stances. Some think that the only truth lies with empirical science and so the age of philosophy is over. Or some think its purpose is to chart the different meanings of terms as they are used in ordinary speech. Some think human studies should be value free whereas others are open to values so long as God is excluded. The phenomenologists would describe and the existentialists decide. Is there some way of bringing the philosophical world together so that it can address the world we find with its huge tasks and its specialised developments?
The recognition that there are different sorts of norms to be recognised in different sorts of activities is perhaps a starting point. So if you are riding in a bike race you need to look to your diet, or you won’t have enough energy. If you are looking after children, there are again norms about diet and also about conduct. The children might set the house on fire. There are norms around what it is to be a responsible parent. A failure to fulfil responsible norms which one recognises leads to a feeling of guilt.
So, according to one’s goal an appropriate norm is to attend to the data. If you are a bank clerk, you should count the notes in the wad carefully, but if you are a painter, you should note how the sunlight falls on the wad. We all live in the same world but we notice things differently according to the purposes which occupy us, “our memories, associations, a structure and one’s emotive and expressive reactions”. Sensation is rarely just raw sensation but rather a perception of some sort, and the perception to be worthy needs according to one’s purpose, to fulfil certain norms.
So sometimes I set myself the task of doing some reading, but sometimes I find I am quite distracted so that as the words pass before my eyes, I find I am not there, I am somewhere else. I have a choice – somehow to recall myself to the task in hand, or set myself the different task of finding out what it is that is occupying me, and preoccupying me. To read without taking in what is said, fails to fulfil the norm ”be attentive”.
One might say that the norm of being attentive is purely subjective, but if a painter only occasionally noticed the little matter of light and shade, his colleagues and critics would point out the fact and make him aware that his subjective fault had an objective set of consequences which, attended to, would bring him round to a better performance. I think one can see that in the scientific world and the scholarly world, the example of others and their advice helps subjectively to attain a better standard, to recognise the norms of subjectivity.
In a social discipline such as science, one can recognise the influence of others, but it is perhaps not out of place to note the development from the id to the ego, from the ego to the self, and from the self to the affirmation of individual identity. The id is the subconscious ordination to pleasure, survival and procreation and so the source of instinctual unfolding. The ego is that unfolding coming under the influence of archetypes which are sociologically carried. There are things appropriate for a boy or for a girl. Sex is here an archetypal controller. Or “Every little boy or girl that’s born alive is either a little Liberal or a Conservative”. I heard of a little boy wild about dressing up, and I felt sorry for him, for somehow the archetype had not been communicated through the subtle world of praise and blame. The ego then is shaped by archetypes. Imagine a little king – everyone should bow to him! The ego could rule a life, but the emergence of the self is something different. The self has projects and sacrifices to make to bring an achievement to fruition. It takes its cue from the world it finds and the opportunities presented. A sense of identity may be achieved and a reputation established. The affirmation of identity is not just a matter of the present and the future, but also of the past. I am the same one who has passed through infancy, the carelessness of schooldays, the discipline of study, a marriage, successful or not etc, etc. Potencies have been unfolding, but all along the same one has been engaged. There have been mistakes – I bear the scars. There have been sins – there is the task of repentance and reparation. There is the dawn of holiness. I recognise this identical self in its development is set for eternity.
So man inescapably finds himself set in a religious context. Facing fearsome problems in time one may seek to escape but can you escape from being the self that you are? Religion brings a transformation of that self to a self that is loved and, through the vicissitudes of life, learning to love. The transformation, so full of meaning, gives rise to a further specialisation as it is reflected upon, so in addition to commonsense, science, scholarships and art, we find theology, resulting from “in loveness” dominating the meaning of life.
If one remains with the scholastics and the priority of metaphysics, then one would be able to conclude that the supernatural infinitely outweighs the natural. The natural is its own order, but the supernatural is the middle ground between infinite divinity and mortal and indeed sinful humanity. There is upon man, the endless task of conversion from a simply natural set of demands to the demands and gifts of God Himself, whose ways are not our ways.
If one shifts from the metaphysical outlook, which gives one first, principles from which to make valid deductions, to the outlook which recognises the human subject himself in his authentic recognition of the norms governing subjectivity, then the infinite outweighing of the natural by the supernatural becomes the fact that it is love and God’s love that gives meaning to one’s life and there is nothing else, even a metaphysical first principle, that can outweigh the existential fact.
Such a realisation is not automatically matched by a flawless performance, for life has many demands and distractions and so the love of God when realised, sets in motion a process of conversion lasting over a lifetime in which the gift of love is more profoundly acknowledged and more efficaciously responded to. One can blandly say that washing up is part of God’s will but one’s motivation easily descends to the pragmatic, whereas conversion is concerned with that motivation as consciously moving. There is then, a luminous intensification possible and monastic life might help it. Intensification is a taking thought, a getting interested, a gaining of insights and a context in which to express them, a coalescence of insights so that a person’s inner structure develops and changes moving towards Christian, or other religious maturity in a development which may be experienced as crushingly slow. Still, understanding does develop and moves towards fullness as it embraces in the mystery but increasingly clearly all that God has made and plans. With concern for one’s development, others and the world a clear moral dimension emerges. Concern with values and the invisible ground of love brings awareness of the potency of mind and so also an intellectual conversion.
A metaphysical analysis reveals the mind as capax omnia, as unlimited in its scope but awareness of the priority of love gives mind its task in discerning the right order of things against “all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men”, and so the task of overcoming evil with good and lies with truth. The world is in greater measure than one realises, a conspiracy which consents to evil.
The spirit blows where it will. The above analysis is derived from a Christian context, of course, but is philosophical rather than theological and so might be acceptable to any person of a different tradition. It shows philosophy to be not just the love of wisdom, but the wisdom which acknowledges its grounding in love. It is a wisdom which recognises subjective norms, which are objective and binding and shows such norms to exist where consciousness is differentiated scientifically, in a scholarly way; in an artistic way; in a religious way and indeed, in a philosophical way which is authentic and recognises norms arising from consciousness itself. So there is a norm not to waste one’s life sleeping!
Matter, Form, Potency and Act
It is true that one can construct an abstract notion of human nature and make certain deductions. Medicine does this very successfully, but the very success of medicine witnesses to another dimension which always belongs to man in the concrete, namely historicity. There was a time when nothing was known about DNA – now every year adds to man’s knowledge in a historical development.
Certain developments belong to all, affecting the culture, the set of meanings, values, and beliefs that inform life. One cannot avoid the fact that the Jewish people had a uniquely important historical experience over two millennia before Christ and indeed subsequently. Nor can one avoid the arrival of Christianity on the stage and the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine. There are first millennium conciliar teachings about the Trinity and Christology; there are second millennium schisms and the divide of the Western Church by the Reformation, a movement which appears not have affected the Greek Orthodox Church.
While nature can simply be explored as a constant that yields up its secrets in greater and greater and greater degree, history does not manifest a simple progress with everyone growing closer and closer in mind and heart. There are radically different stances and one cannot avoid being brought up within one tradition or another.
The fact that we are shaped by tradition becomes clearer as human studies develop. The Enlightenment thought mankind might have a new start, basing everything on reason, and a golden future beckoned in which man-made progress would lead mankind into sunny uplands. The idea of Progress became the leitmotif in late Victorian and the early Edwardian age, foundering in the First World War. Freedom from tradition does not mean freedom from ideology. It is as if Reason is fine once you find the first principle, but how do you find the first principle?
What science witnesses to is not a set of first principles but rather a method which leads to discovery. With natural science the discovery concerns nature and so is universal. With historical science, “The geisteswissenschaften”, the discovery concerns another people at another time, and how and why they acted as they did. Religious beliefs show up as a regular component in the historical shaping of man, so you get a sociology of religion and also religious studies.
So religion was found by Durkheim to help man in his vital social commitments, for example to marriage or to the State. It was found to be a principle guiding societies by Talcott-Parsons, or I suppose in our present society, one might say not guiding Society! Obviously a society with a common religious tradition has values which have to be respected, and so it has a basis for praise and blame. The finding of such values on a purely rational basis is not unproblematic. So I think the present government would like to be able to define what it is to be British, but rightly finds it beyond them. Life for most people does not in the end come down to supporting a cricket team, or even a political party. The different religions of the world seek in their different ways to express the ultimate meaning and value of human life, and the Christian might find here expression of the fact that God gives all men sufficient grace to be saved.
Are we in a position to lay down a common historical tradition for mankind today? That tradition everywhere has to be founded upon the practicality of making a living and doing so in an ecologically sustainable way. The discovery that animals and so man depends on a habitat, goes back I think to the 1950s.
It includes the discovery of mind with the Greeks. According to Jaspers this discovery was an axial moment going on in some way with other cultures. That discovery in the West led to a “tinge” of theoretical consciousness, so that, for example, Athanasius could make his rule. That tinge has allowed dogmas to be expressed and sciences to develop, so that modern science as an ongoing reality belongs to mankind’s common historical tradition.
Modern man is aware of different histories and different cultures, of the geisteswissenschaften, of the idea that man’s different concerns and achievements at different times can be increasingly understood and expressed. Such work is value free to the extent that, if one is to reconstruct the constructions of the human spirit, one should not fall silent when one discovers an aberration, for example, the religious aberration of child sacrifice, or the slaughter of the infidel. Such study is likely to show up historical folly and perhaps indicate more fruitful paths in the present. So, for example, the Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations in 1949, while in some ways it perhaps went too far and in other ways not far enough, pointed to a common moral kernel for mankind, affirmed from recent aberrations.
While the scientific and the historical differentiations of consciousness have had their axial moment, perhaps the artistic differentiation, with its undoubted masters, has not. It has lost touch with religion and perhaps sometimes with meaning and feeling. It has something to do with communicating beauty in its embodiment of meaning and value, to the multitude.
The religious differentiation has its supreme moment in the Paschal Mystery but perhaps an axial moment was December 7th 1965, when the Vatican Council published its Declaration on Religious Liberty. About this supremely important exercise of understanding and responsibility there should be no coercion.
Philosophy has been caught up in worlds of metaphysics, religion, science and more recently personal decision. Alongside man’s growing knowledge then, is the human subject who makes the advances. I suppose it must have been about 1951 that Lonergan, writing his book Insight, (published 1957) descried the structure of the human subject and the norms, “Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible”. This was something axial. Man’s faltering performance is assisted by the mystery of love which surrounds, touches and informs human living but here we deal with religion.
Alongside human nature then, our human living in the modern world is informed by modern science, modern history by modern art which has, it seems, yet to find its axial moment, by religion moving to find common ground and by a philosophic achievement which shows man as formed by tradition, as capable of critical assessment, as bound to be constructive. This group of historicity as a compound with nature should help all things forward.
The recognition of man in the concrete as a compound of historicity and nature means that “progress” needs to include historicity as well as nature, so that just as there is care for the public health, so there should be care for the different communities. Logically, if we care for the Welsh speakers, we should care for the Polish speakers and all peoples with strange dialects, but perhaps it is not unreasonable to care that all share a common language. So too, there are different religions but again, all religions should recognise “nature” and also “historicity”. The recognition of historicity should mean the glad recognition that the same God is working in other groups.
The recognition of historicity should make the natural sciences realise that their competence is not about every matter. It is beyond the competence of a natural scientist to dismiss God, or for that matter to decide in favour of this or that religion. Different sorts of questions require different sorts of method.
Religion may find itself involved in various historical affirmations, but of course, that does not mean competence in all such affirmations. The community of historians have their own methodology moving from evidence to conclusion. They can enrich a religion with a yet more inspiring description of their past.
Beauty is transcendent, belonging to God, as well as belonging to material forms, but I think one might claim that without beauty, feelings are not stirred, and without refinement of beauty, feelings are not refined. The common sense world waits on the artist to find the way forward.
Maybe as philosophy descries the task of natural science and of history and as it may open man to the divine, so it may help the world of art to find anew its soul in this modern world and so to greatly help the multitude.
Certain developments belong to all, affecting the culture, the set of meanings, values, and beliefs that inform life. One cannot avoid the fact that the Jewish people had a uniquely important historical experience over two millennia before Christ and indeed subsequently. Nor can one avoid the arrival of Christianity on the stage and the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine. There are first millennium conciliar teachings about the Trinity and Christology; there are second millennium schisms and the divide of the Western Church by the Reformation, a movement which appears not have affected the Greek Orthodox Church.
While nature can simply be explored as a constant that yields up its secrets in greater and greater and greater degree, history does not manifest a simple progress with everyone growing closer and closer in mind and heart. There are radically different stances and one cannot avoid being brought up within one tradition or another.
The fact that we are shaped by tradition becomes clearer as human studies develop. The Enlightenment thought mankind might have a new start, basing everything on reason, and a golden future beckoned in which man-made progress would lead mankind into sunny uplands. The idea of Progress became the leitmotif in late Victorian and the early Edwardian age, foundering in the First World War. Freedom from tradition does not mean freedom from ideology. It is as if Reason is fine once you find the first principle, but how do you find the first principle?
What science witnesses to is not a set of first principles but rather a method which leads to discovery. With natural science the discovery concerns nature and so is universal. With historical science, “The geisteswissenschaften”, the discovery concerns another people at another time, and how and why they acted as they did. Religious beliefs show up as a regular component in the historical shaping of man, so you get a sociology of religion and also religious studies.
So religion was found by Durkheim to help man in his vital social commitments, for example to marriage or to the State. It was found to be a principle guiding societies by Talcott-Parsons, or I suppose in our present society, one might say not guiding Society! Obviously a society with a common religious tradition has values which have to be respected, and so it has a basis for praise and blame. The finding of such values on a purely rational basis is not unproblematic. So I think the present government would like to be able to define what it is to be British, but rightly finds it beyond them. Life for most people does not in the end come down to supporting a cricket team, or even a political party. The different religions of the world seek in their different ways to express the ultimate meaning and value of human life, and the Christian might find here expression of the fact that God gives all men sufficient grace to be saved.
Are we in a position to lay down a common historical tradition for mankind today? That tradition everywhere has to be founded upon the practicality of making a living and doing so in an ecologically sustainable way. The discovery that animals and so man depends on a habitat, goes back I think to the 1950s.
It includes the discovery of mind with the Greeks. According to Jaspers this discovery was an axial moment going on in some way with other cultures. That discovery in the West led to a “tinge” of theoretical consciousness, so that, for example, Athanasius could make his rule. That tinge has allowed dogmas to be expressed and sciences to develop, so that modern science as an ongoing reality belongs to mankind’s common historical tradition.
Modern man is aware of different histories and different cultures, of the geisteswissenschaften, of the idea that man’s different concerns and achievements at different times can be increasingly understood and expressed. Such work is value free to the extent that, if one is to reconstruct the constructions of the human spirit, one should not fall silent when one discovers an aberration, for example, the religious aberration of child sacrifice, or the slaughter of the infidel. Such study is likely to show up historical folly and perhaps indicate more fruitful paths in the present. So, for example, the Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations in 1949, while in some ways it perhaps went too far and in other ways not far enough, pointed to a common moral kernel for mankind, affirmed from recent aberrations.
While the scientific and the historical differentiations of consciousness have had their axial moment, perhaps the artistic differentiation, with its undoubted masters, has not. It has lost touch with religion and perhaps sometimes with meaning and feeling. It has something to do with communicating beauty in its embodiment of meaning and value, to the multitude.
The religious differentiation has its supreme moment in the Paschal Mystery but perhaps an axial moment was December 7th 1965, when the Vatican Council published its Declaration on Religious Liberty. About this supremely important exercise of understanding and responsibility there should be no coercion.
Philosophy has been caught up in worlds of metaphysics, religion, science and more recently personal decision. Alongside man’s growing knowledge then, is the human subject who makes the advances. I suppose it must have been about 1951 that Lonergan, writing his book Insight, (published 1957) descried the structure of the human subject and the norms, “Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible”. This was something axial. Man’s faltering performance is assisted by the mystery of love which surrounds, touches and informs human living but here we deal with religion.
Alongside human nature then, our human living in the modern world is informed by modern science, modern history by modern art which has, it seems, yet to find its axial moment, by religion moving to find common ground and by a philosophic achievement which shows man as formed by tradition, as capable of critical assessment, as bound to be constructive. This group of historicity as a compound with nature should help all things forward.
The recognition of man in the concrete as a compound of historicity and nature means that “progress” needs to include historicity as well as nature, so that just as there is care for the public health, so there should be care for the different communities. Logically, if we care for the Welsh speakers, we should care for the Polish speakers and all peoples with strange dialects, but perhaps it is not unreasonable to care that all share a common language. So too, there are different religions but again, all religions should recognise “nature” and also “historicity”. The recognition of historicity should mean the glad recognition that the same God is working in other groups.
The recognition of historicity should make the natural sciences realise that their competence is not about every matter. It is beyond the competence of a natural scientist to dismiss God, or for that matter to decide in favour of this or that religion. Different sorts of questions require different sorts of method.
Religion may find itself involved in various historical affirmations, but of course, that does not mean competence in all such affirmations. The community of historians have their own methodology moving from evidence to conclusion. They can enrich a religion with a yet more inspiring description of their past.
Beauty is transcendent, belonging to God, as well as belonging to material forms, but I think one might claim that without beauty, feelings are not stirred, and without refinement of beauty, feelings are not refined. The common sense world waits on the artist to find the way forward.
Maybe as philosophy descries the task of natural science and of history and as it may open man to the divine, so it may help the world of art to find anew its soul in this modern world and so to greatly help the multitude.
Historicity and Foundations
It is true that one can construct an abstract notion of human nature and make certain deductions. Medicine does this very successfully, but the very success of medicine witnesses to another dimension which always belongs to man in the concrete, namely historicity. There was a time when nothing was known about DNA – now every year adds to man’s knowledge in a historical development.
Certain developments belong to all, affecting the culture, the set of meanings, values, and beliefs that inform life. One cannot avoid the fact that the Jewish people had a uniquely important historical experience over two millennia before Christ and indeed subsequently. Nor can one avoid the arrival of Christianity on the stage and the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine. There are first millennium conciliar teachings about the Trinity and Christology; there are second millennium schisms and the divide of the Western Church by the Reformation, a movement which appears not have affected the Greek Orthodox Church.
While nature can simply be explored as a constant that yields up its secrets in greater and greater and greater degree, history does not manifest a simple progress with everyone growing closer and closer in mind and heart. There are radically different stances and one cannot avoid being brought up within one tradition or another.
The fact that we are shaped by tradition becomes clearer as human studies develop. The Enlightenment thought mankind might have a new start, basing everything on reason, and a golden future beckoned in which man-made progress would lead mankind into sunny uplands. The idea of Progress became the leitmotif in late Victorian and the early Edwardian age, foundering in the First World War. Freedom from tradition does not mean freedom from ideology. It is as if Reason is fine once you find the first principle, but how do you find the first principle?
What science witnesses to is not a set of first principles but rather a method which leads to discovery. With natural science the discovery concerns nature and so is universal. With historical science, “The geisteswissenschaften”, the discovery concerns another people at another time, and how and why they acted as they did. Religious beliefs show up as a regular component in the historical shaping of man, so you get a sociology of religion and also religious studies.
So religion was found by Durkheim to help man in his vital social commitments, for example to marriage or to the State. It was found to be a principle guiding societies by Talcott-Parsons, or I suppose in our present society, one might say not guiding Society! Obviously a society with a common religious tradition has values which have to be respected, and so it has a basis for praise and blame. The finding of such values on a purely rational basis is not unproblematic. So I think the present government would like to be able to define what it is to be British, but rightly finds it beyond them. Life for most people does not in the end come down to supporting a cricket team, or even a political party. The different religions of the world seek in their different ways to express the ultimate meaning and value of human life, and the Christian might find here expression of the fact that God gives all men sufficient grace to be saved.
Are we in a position to lay down a common historical tradition for mankind today? That tradition everywhere has to be founded upon the practicality of making a living and doing so in an ecologically sustainable way. The discovery that animals and so man depends on a habitat, goes back I think to the 1950s.
It includes the discovery of mind with the Greeks. According to Jaspers this discovery was an axial moment going on in some way with other cultures. That discovery in the West led to a “tinge” of theoretical consciousness, so that, for example, Athanasius could make his rule. That tinge has allowed dogmas to be expressed and sciences to develop, so that modern science as an ongoing reality belongs to mankind’s common historical tradition.
Modern man is aware of different histories and different cultures, of the geisteswissenschaften, of the idea that man’s different concerns and achievements at different times can be increasingly understood and expressed. Such work is value free to the extent that, if one is to reconstruct the constructions of the human spirit, one should not fall silent when one discovers an aberration, for example, the religious aberration of child sacrifice, or the slaughter of the infidel. Such study is likely to show up historical folly and perhaps indicate more fruitful paths in the present. So, for example, the Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations in 1949, while in some ways it perhaps went too far and in other ways not far enough, pointed to a common moral kernel for mankind, affirmed from recent aberrations.
While the scientific and the historical differentiations of consciousness have had their axial moment, perhaps the artistic differentiation, with its undoubted masters, has not. It has lost touch with religion and perhaps sometimes with meaning and feeling. It has something to do with communicating beauty in its embodiment of meaning and value, to the multitude.
The religious differentiation has its supreme moment in the Paschal Mystery but perhaps an axial moment was December 7th 1965, when the Vatican Council published its Declaration on Religious Liberty. About this supremely important exercise of understanding and responsibility there should be no coercion.
Philosophy has been caught up in worlds of metaphysics, religion, science and more recently personal decision. Alongside man’s growing knowledge then, is the human subject who makes the advances. I suppose it must have been about 1951 that Lonergan, writing his book Insight, (published 1957) descried the structure of the human subject and the norms, “Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible”. This was something axial. Man’s faltering performance is assisted by the mystery of love which surrounds, touches and informs human living but here we deal with religion.
Alongside human nature then, our human living in the modern world is informed by modern science, modern history by modern art which has, it seems, yet to find its axial moment, by religion moving to find common ground and by a philosophic achievement which shows man as formed by tradition, as capable of critical assessment, as bound to be constructive. This group of historicity as a compound with nature should help all things forward.
The recognition of man in the concrete as a compound of historicity and nature means that “progress” needs to include historicity as well as nature, so that just as there is care for the public health, so there should be care for the different communities. Logically, if we care for the Welsh speakers, we should care for the Polish speakers and all peoples with strange dialects, but perhaps it is not unreasonable to care that all share a common language. So too, there are different religions but again, all religions should recognise “nature” and also “historicity”. The recognition of historicity should mean the glad recognition that the same God is working in other groups.
The recognition of historicity should make the natural sciences realise that their competence is not about every matter. It is beyond the competence of a natural scientist to dismiss God, or for that matter to decide in favour of this or that religion. Different sorts of questions require different sorts of method.
Religion may find itself involved in various historical affirmations, but of course, that does not mean competence in all such affirmations. The community of historians have their own methodology moving from evidence to conclusion. They can enrich a religion with a yet more inspiring description of their past.
Beauty is transcendent, belonging to God, as well as belonging to material forms, but I think one might claim that without beauty, feelings are not stirred, and without refinement of beauty, feelings are not refined. The common sense world waits on the artist to find the way forward.
Maybe as philosophy descries the task of natural science and of history and as it may open man to the divine, so it may help the world of art to find anew its soul in this modern world and so to greatly help the multitude.
Certain developments belong to all, affecting the culture, the set of meanings, values, and beliefs that inform life. One cannot avoid the fact that the Jewish people had a uniquely important historical experience over two millennia before Christ and indeed subsequently. Nor can one avoid the arrival of Christianity on the stage and the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine. There are first millennium conciliar teachings about the Trinity and Christology; there are second millennium schisms and the divide of the Western Church by the Reformation, a movement which appears not have affected the Greek Orthodox Church.
While nature can simply be explored as a constant that yields up its secrets in greater and greater and greater degree, history does not manifest a simple progress with everyone growing closer and closer in mind and heart. There are radically different stances and one cannot avoid being brought up within one tradition or another.
The fact that we are shaped by tradition becomes clearer as human studies develop. The Enlightenment thought mankind might have a new start, basing everything on reason, and a golden future beckoned in which man-made progress would lead mankind into sunny uplands. The idea of Progress became the leitmotif in late Victorian and the early Edwardian age, foundering in the First World War. Freedom from tradition does not mean freedom from ideology. It is as if Reason is fine once you find the first principle, but how do you find the first principle?
What science witnesses to is not a set of first principles but rather a method which leads to discovery. With natural science the discovery concerns nature and so is universal. With historical science, “The geisteswissenschaften”, the discovery concerns another people at another time, and how and why they acted as they did. Religious beliefs show up as a regular component in the historical shaping of man, so you get a sociology of religion and also religious studies.
So religion was found by Durkheim to help man in his vital social commitments, for example to marriage or to the State. It was found to be a principle guiding societies by Talcott-Parsons, or I suppose in our present society, one might say not guiding Society! Obviously a society with a common religious tradition has values which have to be respected, and so it has a basis for praise and blame. The finding of such values on a purely rational basis is not unproblematic. So I think the present government would like to be able to define what it is to be British, but rightly finds it beyond them. Life for most people does not in the end come down to supporting a cricket team, or even a political party. The different religions of the world seek in their different ways to express the ultimate meaning and value of human life, and the Christian might find here expression of the fact that God gives all men sufficient grace to be saved.
Are we in a position to lay down a common historical tradition for mankind today? That tradition everywhere has to be founded upon the practicality of making a living and doing so in an ecologically sustainable way. The discovery that animals and so man depends on a habitat, goes back I think to the 1950s.
It includes the discovery of mind with the Greeks. According to Jaspers this discovery was an axial moment going on in some way with other cultures. That discovery in the West led to a “tinge” of theoretical consciousness, so that, for example, Athanasius could make his rule. That tinge has allowed dogmas to be expressed and sciences to develop, so that modern science as an ongoing reality belongs to mankind’s common historical tradition.
Modern man is aware of different histories and different cultures, of the geisteswissenschaften, of the idea that man’s different concerns and achievements at different times can be increasingly understood and expressed. Such work is value free to the extent that, if one is to reconstruct the constructions of the human spirit, one should not fall silent when one discovers an aberration, for example, the religious aberration of child sacrifice, or the slaughter of the infidel. Such study is likely to show up historical folly and perhaps indicate more fruitful paths in the present. So, for example, the Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations in 1949, while in some ways it perhaps went too far and in other ways not far enough, pointed to a common moral kernel for mankind, affirmed from recent aberrations.
While the scientific and the historical differentiations of consciousness have had their axial moment, perhaps the artistic differentiation, with its undoubted masters, has not. It has lost touch with religion and perhaps sometimes with meaning and feeling. It has something to do with communicating beauty in its embodiment of meaning and value, to the multitude.
The religious differentiation has its supreme moment in the Paschal Mystery but perhaps an axial moment was December 7th 1965, when the Vatican Council published its Declaration on Religious Liberty. About this supremely important exercise of understanding and responsibility there should be no coercion.
Philosophy has been caught up in worlds of metaphysics, religion, science and more recently personal decision. Alongside man’s growing knowledge then, is the human subject who makes the advances. I suppose it must have been about 1951 that Lonergan, writing his book Insight, (published 1957) descried the structure of the human subject and the norms, “Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible”. This was something axial. Man’s faltering performance is assisted by the mystery of love which surrounds, touches and informs human living but here we deal with religion.
Alongside human nature then, our human living in the modern world is informed by modern science, modern history by modern art which has, it seems, yet to find its axial moment, by religion moving to find common ground and by a philosophic achievement which shows man as formed by tradition, as capable of critical assessment, as bound to be constructive. This group of historicity as a compound with nature should help all things forward.
The recognition of man in the concrete as a compound of historicity and nature means that “progress” needs to include historicity as well as nature, so that just as there is care for the public health, so there should be care for the different communities. Logically, if we care for the Welsh speakers, we should care for the Polish speakers and all peoples with strange dialects, but perhaps it is not unreasonable to care that all share a common language. So too, there are different religions but again, all religions should recognise “nature” and also “historicity”. The recognition of historicity should mean the glad recognition that the same God is working in other groups.
The recognition of historicity should make the natural sciences realise that their competence is not about every matter. It is beyond the competence of a natural scientist to dismiss God, or for that matter to decide in favour of this or that religion. Different sorts of questions require different sorts of method.
Religion may find itself involved in various historical affirmations, but of course, that does not mean competence in all such affirmations. The community of historians have their own methodology moving from evidence to conclusion. They can enrich a religion with a yet more inspiring description of their past.
Beauty is transcendent, belonging to God, as well as belonging to material forms, but I think one might claim that without beauty, feelings are not stirred, and without refinement of beauty, feelings are not refined. The common sense world waits on the artist to find the way forward.
Maybe as philosophy descries the task of natural science and of history and as it may open man to the divine, so it may help the world of art to find anew its soul in this modern world and so to greatly help the multitude.
The Role of Philosophy
Early man, as well as hunting and gathering, appears to have been much caught up in myth and magic. Early religion appears to have known spiritual ecstasy and promoted it by such things as mushrooms and physical exercises. One can see dangers here, especially when problems such as drought were faced, for religion would be interpreted by myth and myth does not have a means of criticising meanings and coming to know the truth and the right thing to do, so easily enough man found himself the victim of his own mythic powers and bound to cruel activities such as human sacrifice, even the sacrifice of children. It is a mark of its divine inspiration that the Old Testament, living in such a world, is entirely free of child sacrifice, though the story of Abraham and Isaac shows that such a thing was “in the air”.
Philosophy is the discovery of mind, the discovery of a yardstick man, from his human resources, can bring to bear on things human and divine, and indeed on the natural world around. So before atoms were thought of men thought everything was composed of earth, air, fire and water. The Greek philosophers do not seem to have hit on the idea of creation. The myths accounted for the beginning of things. The early philosophers seem to have thought the world had always been there and perhaps always would be. Recurrence was a theme. They thought the divine worked within them helping them to develop their understanding. Aristotle thought one should follow this inner light, and this way perhaps become divine.
Life presented man with an option: to go for power and pleasure and praise but in this way to lose one’s own self. Pride leads to a fall; or to seek truth and excellence in a genuinely human way under the guidance of God. Aristotle studies virtues and vices in a rigorous and systematic way, finding that virtue was a middle path between excess and lack. So courage lies between cowardice and foolhardiness. St Thomas Aquinas found he could accept many of Aristotle’s conclusions.
Greek philosophy then was something like a religion with a way of life. It belonged, of course, to an elite and the way of life was based on slavery.
An important conclusion they reached was that either a thing was, or it was not. There was no middle ground for being. There was a missionary in Japan who came across the idea held by the religious leaders there, that there were many different paths to Heaven. He argues with them for several years about there being no middle ground between being and not being and eventually he won the argument and they all joined the Church with their people
St Thomas the Apostle took the faith to Kerala, India. He founded a church which still exists, but the mission did not flourish and convert India. I recall Bishop Butler noting how “Christianity went West” and he suggested this was not just because of Roman roads and civilisation, but because Greek philosophy permeated the Western world.
Lonergan makes the same point in discussing the Council of Nicea. The fathers were Greek and their culture had a philosophical “tincture” so that it was possible to make statements about statements, so you get the Athanasian rule that whatever one says of the Father, one must say of the Son, except that the Father is the Father and the Son the Son. The key word at Nicea, homoouson, did not come from philosophy but from cloth merchants – it meant “of the same stuff”.
Cardinal Newman in his book on Arianism makes an extraordinary statement. Emanating from Babylon, there were in 325AD 56 Archbishoprics spreading into China and North India. These fell prey to Arianism and so, 300 years later, to the Moslem religion. Was the reason for this the lack of a philosophic tincture to the general culture, so that the rules for apprehending the meaning of the Council of Nicea were not comprehensible and so not effective?
This story shows the value of “a philosophic” tincture belonging to a culture. It perhaps provides a link in conversation with Moslems and explains the great devotion they have to Jesus and Mary. It perhaps also suggests the importance of a philosophic tincture for the Church and the world today.
While the philosophic spirit exposed the mythological basis around ancient public religions, it is valuable to notice that for around 2,000 years, from 500BC to 1600AD, philosophy and religion went hand in hand, especially in the immense scholastic achievement running from 1070 to 1274, which came to use the metaphysics and logic of Aristotle in a systematic way. For the scholastics, philosophy was not regarded as autonomous but rather as the handmaid of theology. Especially important was the distinction between nature and grace (Philip the Chancellor, 1230). That very distinction though, grounded the possibility of natural science, of philosophy and of history developing in autonomous ways, so that science and history came to recognise their way forward, the canons which govern their methodical advance. So for science, the Royal Society (1660) recognised only observation and experiment and, perhaps for history, a key moment was the recognition that it is about the constructions, good or bad, of the human spirit.
In medieval times it was thought that Theology using Aristotle’s philosophy could address the whole of Western culture, but the development of Western Science involved dropping the link of thought with Aristotle. Scientific method uses mathematical correlation to anticipate physical correlation. The theories it holds are for the most part just the best at the moment. Correlation has replaced causality. Scientists and Theologians might talk about “truth”, but where the Theologian based on Aristotle, means knowledge of causes, the scientist means the best possible knowledge of correlations. Here is a problem for modern philosophy to address.
In history again, if one see history as the recording of events – so 1066, the Norman invasion of England – then what you have is a series of more or less definite facts. If though, history is to be the reconstruction of the constructions of the human spirit, then a development in psychology, or a development in sociology might give one new insights into the motivation of William the Conqueror. One makes progress not about points of certitude but rather about points that are less than certain.
What applies to our knowledge of William the Conqueror applies also to our knowledge of the prophet Isaiah. I think one can see that here, too, there is a problem for Theology. It is great to have greater knowledge of Isaiah, but it is problematic if definite prophecies – Virgo concipiet – become utterances with probable meanings.
Lonergan in writing of Christology and in recognising how studies endlessly move things forward, finds in the title given to Christ in every(?) new testament document – the Son of God - an irreversible starting point.
In a situation where Aristotle somehow needs to be broadened out so that he can cope with modern science and modern history, I find helpful his remark that one does not expect the same sort of reasoning from a politician as from a mathematician.
The conclusion of reasoning, “the truth” as we know it, was identified by Aquinas as being “Ens et verum convertuntur”. For Lonergan, a truth affirmed becomes part of a person’s horizon, and since it is communicable, part of man’s world. For Lonergan and others (Heidegger) as our knowledge of the world expands, so does our knowledge of the self.
If the only knowledge man can have is of empirical science, then he himself becomes a merely material object. Philosophers today may confirm or deny this. How does one base this further autonomous discipline?
Philosophy is the discovery of mind, the discovery of a yardstick man, from his human resources, can bring to bear on things human and divine, and indeed on the natural world around. So before atoms were thought of men thought everything was composed of earth, air, fire and water. The Greek philosophers do not seem to have hit on the idea of creation. The myths accounted for the beginning of things. The early philosophers seem to have thought the world had always been there and perhaps always would be. Recurrence was a theme. They thought the divine worked within them helping them to develop their understanding. Aristotle thought one should follow this inner light, and this way perhaps become divine.
Life presented man with an option: to go for power and pleasure and praise but in this way to lose one’s own self. Pride leads to a fall; or to seek truth and excellence in a genuinely human way under the guidance of God. Aristotle studies virtues and vices in a rigorous and systematic way, finding that virtue was a middle path between excess and lack. So courage lies between cowardice and foolhardiness. St Thomas Aquinas found he could accept many of Aristotle’s conclusions.
Greek philosophy then was something like a religion with a way of life. It belonged, of course, to an elite and the way of life was based on slavery.
An important conclusion they reached was that either a thing was, or it was not. There was no middle ground for being. There was a missionary in Japan who came across the idea held by the religious leaders there, that there were many different paths to Heaven. He argues with them for several years about there being no middle ground between being and not being and eventually he won the argument and they all joined the Church with their people
St Thomas the Apostle took the faith to Kerala, India. He founded a church which still exists, but the mission did not flourish and convert India. I recall Bishop Butler noting how “Christianity went West” and he suggested this was not just because of Roman roads and civilisation, but because Greek philosophy permeated the Western world.
Lonergan makes the same point in discussing the Council of Nicea. The fathers were Greek and their culture had a philosophical “tincture” so that it was possible to make statements about statements, so you get the Athanasian rule that whatever one says of the Father, one must say of the Son, except that the Father is the Father and the Son the Son. The key word at Nicea, homoouson, did not come from philosophy but from cloth merchants – it meant “of the same stuff”.
Cardinal Newman in his book on Arianism makes an extraordinary statement. Emanating from Babylon, there were in 325AD 56 Archbishoprics spreading into China and North India. These fell prey to Arianism and so, 300 years later, to the Moslem religion. Was the reason for this the lack of a philosophic tincture to the general culture, so that the rules for apprehending the meaning of the Council of Nicea were not comprehensible and so not effective?
This story shows the value of “a philosophic” tincture belonging to a culture. It perhaps provides a link in conversation with Moslems and explains the great devotion they have to Jesus and Mary. It perhaps also suggests the importance of a philosophic tincture for the Church and the world today.
While the philosophic spirit exposed the mythological basis around ancient public religions, it is valuable to notice that for around 2,000 years, from 500BC to 1600AD, philosophy and religion went hand in hand, especially in the immense scholastic achievement running from 1070 to 1274, which came to use the metaphysics and logic of Aristotle in a systematic way. For the scholastics, philosophy was not regarded as autonomous but rather as the handmaid of theology. Especially important was the distinction between nature and grace (Philip the Chancellor, 1230). That very distinction though, grounded the possibility of natural science, of philosophy and of history developing in autonomous ways, so that science and history came to recognise their way forward, the canons which govern their methodical advance. So for science, the Royal Society (1660) recognised only observation and experiment and, perhaps for history, a key moment was the recognition that it is about the constructions, good or bad, of the human spirit.
In medieval times it was thought that Theology using Aristotle’s philosophy could address the whole of Western culture, but the development of Western Science involved dropping the link of thought with Aristotle. Scientific method uses mathematical correlation to anticipate physical correlation. The theories it holds are for the most part just the best at the moment. Correlation has replaced causality. Scientists and Theologians might talk about “truth”, but where the Theologian based on Aristotle, means knowledge of causes, the scientist means the best possible knowledge of correlations. Here is a problem for modern philosophy to address.
In history again, if one see history as the recording of events – so 1066, the Norman invasion of England – then what you have is a series of more or less definite facts. If though, history is to be the reconstruction of the constructions of the human spirit, then a development in psychology, or a development in sociology might give one new insights into the motivation of William the Conqueror. One makes progress not about points of certitude but rather about points that are less than certain.
What applies to our knowledge of William the Conqueror applies also to our knowledge of the prophet Isaiah. I think one can see that here, too, there is a problem for Theology. It is great to have greater knowledge of Isaiah, but it is problematic if definite prophecies – Virgo concipiet – become utterances with probable meanings.
Lonergan in writing of Christology and in recognising how studies endlessly move things forward, finds in the title given to Christ in every(?) new testament document – the Son of God - an irreversible starting point.
In a situation where Aristotle somehow needs to be broadened out so that he can cope with modern science and modern history, I find helpful his remark that one does not expect the same sort of reasoning from a politician as from a mathematician.
The conclusion of reasoning, “the truth” as we know it, was identified by Aquinas as being “Ens et verum convertuntur”. For Lonergan, a truth affirmed becomes part of a person’s horizon, and since it is communicable, part of man’s world. For Lonergan and others (Heidegger) as our knowledge of the world expands, so does our knowledge of the self.
If the only knowledge man can have is of empirical science, then he himself becomes a merely material object. Philosophers today may confirm or deny this. How does one base this further autonomous discipline?
Foundations
Around 1230, Philip the Chancellor of Paris made a distinction between grace and nature, the highest thing in nature being reason, but man could be supernaturally informed, by faith, hope, love, and other virtues such as prudence.
Nature, of course, belongs to all mankind. Today, man finds himself chronically and dangerously divided not just by secular issues and ideologies, but also by religious divides, for example, between the Moslems and the Christians. The idea of nature though provides common ground, so most diseases have cures which are not based on religious differences.
Nature though for Philip included man’s rationality and so the precepts “be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible, be in love” express what Lonergan calls the transposition from faculty analysis to intentionality analysis.
The transposition is from terms and relations that are beyond man’s direct experience to terms and relations which are verifiable in experiences as part of experience.
So Aquinas has “agent intellect” and “passive intellect”, but we have all experienced what it is to be puzzled and what it is to be certain. Aquinas’ terms have a base in metaphysical theory. Lonergan would have us draw foundational terms from our concrete experience, and so bring us to use our own mind and heart with greater confidence. This goes on at the level of nature, but a nature which is opened to and influenced by super-nature. How this openness works in a Hindu, or Moslem, or Christian tradition is for the respective faithful to discern, and the respective theologians to expound.
The foundation we are proposing then is human nature known by human experience, and the experience we find is something dynamic not something static; something historically conditioned not something abstract; something potentially creative not something simply determined.
Of course medicine studies human nature, but here a theoretical knowledge develops which is common to all so that what is discovered conditions man, though it might liberate him from this or that disease. There are diseases to entrap the human spirit though, dramatic bias; egoistic bias; group bias and general bias. These biases work to prevent the unfolding of the human spirit towards the intelligible; the true; the real; the good; the loving and the lovable.
That which weighs most heavily on the human spirit and yet which elevates it above all is the loving and the lovable. Here is found the immeasurable meaning of a life. It may or may not include the religious dimension. Nothing is loved of course unless it is known, except love itself. Here is the dimension to which all religious traditions bear witness. The words of Pascal are helpful: “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know”.
Such love is a starting point not a conclusion of reason. It is experimental not theoretical. It could lead man astray into a sort of spiritual bias so that man undervalues his natural potentialities and perhaps a whole culture might become fatalistic and irresponsible. “What will be, will be”. I think one is discerning a further bias here – in addition to Lonergan’s dramatic, egoistic, group and general – namely a religious bias which so disvalues man’s natural capacities so that through regard for religion man’s normal capacities to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible become disregarded in their normal operation. It might be thought that such a malady could only occur with Eastern Religions but in his essay on ‘The Subject’ (2nd Collection) Lonergan lists Western culprits in the names of “phenomenology, existential self understanding, human encounter, salvation history”. There is the danger of a truncation of human subjectivity. Perhaps some aspects of the charismatic movement would come under criticism here.
Let us call this “religious bias”. It does not of course mean that nothing should be attended to, thought about, concluded upon but such a bias closes the door to genuine developments going on in science, history, art, philosophy and theology. A church or religion can in this way retain a visible unity but contain incompatible positions having lost the possibility of fruitful dialogue. I suggest such bias can go on in quite strange ways. There is a “Christian Bookshop” near here which as far as I can see does not have a single Catholic author. I recall a Catholic dismissing a book written in the 1960’s by a Fr Tyrell because a Fr Tyrell had been a Modernist in the 1890’s.
There is no doubt when a person is religiously converted, they are concerned to maintain what has become the most significant part of their life. I have come across people whose children have become Moonies and who will only read Mooney literature. So it is surely a healthy thing that, since the Council of Trent, the seminary training for the Roman Catholic priesthood has involved two years spent on philosophy alongside six years spent altogether.
However, what we are looking for is a development in philosophy which requires a shift to intentionality analysis, so the philosopher begins to recognise objective norms belonging to subjectivity. So, to be an artist one had best use one’s eyes; to be a scholar one had best read the texts. Beyond the texts though, the scholar must use his judgement. I find myself facing the question, might a certain portrait actually be of Mary Tudor; might it be by Holbein; might the date be 1537? A possibility might be overridden by a fact. A probability can be added to by another bit of evidence. If one is looking for certainty, I think it is good to recall Aristotle’s advice, that one seeks different sorts of evidence in different areas. One expects demonstration from a mathematician but not from a politician. Nevertheless it would be madness for a Holbein scholar to deny that he knew that any Holbeins were by Holbein, or to doubt the existence of Holbein.
It is the area of judgement which is most difficult for modern man to recognise, I think largely because modern science which occupies such a huge realm of modern thought is in many revisable. Einstein has gone ahead of Newton in general and special relativity, but I think in our small group we have seen that his special relativity needs revising. The constant in science is an empirical method. If one is to reach scientific conclusion, it needs to be on the basis of evidence, even if it can be revised and improved upon.
If the area of judgement is difficult for modern man, so that metaphysical principles, for example “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts”, seem as doubtful as Einstein’s special relativity, then intentionality analysis, attending to the data of consciousness as well as the data of sense, finds that judgement belongs to our human existence all the time. So there is the intimate and personal question of love. Do I know what it is to be loved and to love in return? Have I any notion of what it is to be loved by God? The answer here is a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. and for many, the truthful answer maybe ‘No’. If it is ‘Yes’, then from whatever religious tradition one is dealing with a process of conversion, for any love makes demands. “Lex est amor qui ligat et obligat” as Adam of Perseign put it.
Or, is it true that I am a subject of sense experience? One only becomes aware of the question through sense experience, so the judgement here has to be affirmative.
Have I ever understood anything? Here one might go into a panic. I had quite a wise aunt who was prepared to admit that she knew nothing! But if, in English culture, one became specific and asked “Do you know the meaning of the term ‘water’?”, the answer would be ‘Yes’. We have grown up learning to understand things, and in English water is tied up with that wet stuff. We have not only understood but can judge that our understanding is correct.
One might get into deconstructive, post modern mood and say water only means water for English people, but one can point out that terms and meanings develop in an age old collaboration, and that if a doctor dealing with a patient in emergency asks for a bowl of water, your response might be absolutely important, meaning life or death for a patient. The mass murderer might think life or death an unimportant matter anyway. So it is that the ground of significance is love, but love can be concerned about a glass of water given to the thirsty person.
I have been trying to show that concern for appropriate attentiveness, understanding, truth, reality and love belong to everyman be he Hindu, Moslem, Jew, Christian, or nothing in that way. We not only are human, have a human nature, but can confirm the fact through our experience – or be in some way subhuman.
Nature, of course, belongs to all mankind. Today, man finds himself chronically and dangerously divided not just by secular issues and ideologies, but also by religious divides, for example, between the Moslems and the Christians. The idea of nature though provides common ground, so most diseases have cures which are not based on religious differences.
Nature though for Philip included man’s rationality and so the precepts “be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible, be in love” express what Lonergan calls the transposition from faculty analysis to intentionality analysis.
The transposition is from terms and relations that are beyond man’s direct experience to terms and relations which are verifiable in experiences as part of experience.
So Aquinas has “agent intellect” and “passive intellect”, but we have all experienced what it is to be puzzled and what it is to be certain. Aquinas’ terms have a base in metaphysical theory. Lonergan would have us draw foundational terms from our concrete experience, and so bring us to use our own mind and heart with greater confidence. This goes on at the level of nature, but a nature which is opened to and influenced by super-nature. How this openness works in a Hindu, or Moslem, or Christian tradition is for the respective faithful to discern, and the respective theologians to expound.
The foundation we are proposing then is human nature known by human experience, and the experience we find is something dynamic not something static; something historically conditioned not something abstract; something potentially creative not something simply determined.
Of course medicine studies human nature, but here a theoretical knowledge develops which is common to all so that what is discovered conditions man, though it might liberate him from this or that disease. There are diseases to entrap the human spirit though, dramatic bias; egoistic bias; group bias and general bias. These biases work to prevent the unfolding of the human spirit towards the intelligible; the true; the real; the good; the loving and the lovable.
That which weighs most heavily on the human spirit and yet which elevates it above all is the loving and the lovable. Here is found the immeasurable meaning of a life. It may or may not include the religious dimension. Nothing is loved of course unless it is known, except love itself. Here is the dimension to which all religious traditions bear witness. The words of Pascal are helpful: “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know”.
Such love is a starting point not a conclusion of reason. It is experimental not theoretical. It could lead man astray into a sort of spiritual bias so that man undervalues his natural potentialities and perhaps a whole culture might become fatalistic and irresponsible. “What will be, will be”. I think one is discerning a further bias here – in addition to Lonergan’s dramatic, egoistic, group and general – namely a religious bias which so disvalues man’s natural capacities so that through regard for religion man’s normal capacities to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible become disregarded in their normal operation. It might be thought that such a malady could only occur with Eastern Religions but in his essay on ‘The Subject’ (2nd Collection) Lonergan lists Western culprits in the names of “phenomenology, existential self understanding, human encounter, salvation history”. There is the danger of a truncation of human subjectivity. Perhaps some aspects of the charismatic movement would come under criticism here.
Let us call this “religious bias”. It does not of course mean that nothing should be attended to, thought about, concluded upon but such a bias closes the door to genuine developments going on in science, history, art, philosophy and theology. A church or religion can in this way retain a visible unity but contain incompatible positions having lost the possibility of fruitful dialogue. I suggest such bias can go on in quite strange ways. There is a “Christian Bookshop” near here which as far as I can see does not have a single Catholic author. I recall a Catholic dismissing a book written in the 1960’s by a Fr Tyrell because a Fr Tyrell had been a Modernist in the 1890’s.
There is no doubt when a person is religiously converted, they are concerned to maintain what has become the most significant part of their life. I have come across people whose children have become Moonies and who will only read Mooney literature. So it is surely a healthy thing that, since the Council of Trent, the seminary training for the Roman Catholic priesthood has involved two years spent on philosophy alongside six years spent altogether.
However, what we are looking for is a development in philosophy which requires a shift to intentionality analysis, so the philosopher begins to recognise objective norms belonging to subjectivity. So, to be an artist one had best use one’s eyes; to be a scholar one had best read the texts. Beyond the texts though, the scholar must use his judgement. I find myself facing the question, might a certain portrait actually be of Mary Tudor; might it be by Holbein; might the date be 1537? A possibility might be overridden by a fact. A probability can be added to by another bit of evidence. If one is looking for certainty, I think it is good to recall Aristotle’s advice, that one seeks different sorts of evidence in different areas. One expects demonstration from a mathematician but not from a politician. Nevertheless it would be madness for a Holbein scholar to deny that he knew that any Holbeins were by Holbein, or to doubt the existence of Holbein.
It is the area of judgement which is most difficult for modern man to recognise, I think largely because modern science which occupies such a huge realm of modern thought is in many revisable. Einstein has gone ahead of Newton in general and special relativity, but I think in our small group we have seen that his special relativity needs revising. The constant in science is an empirical method. If one is to reach scientific conclusion, it needs to be on the basis of evidence, even if it can be revised and improved upon.
If the area of judgement is difficult for modern man, so that metaphysical principles, for example “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts”, seem as doubtful as Einstein’s special relativity, then intentionality analysis, attending to the data of consciousness as well as the data of sense, finds that judgement belongs to our human existence all the time. So there is the intimate and personal question of love. Do I know what it is to be loved and to love in return? Have I any notion of what it is to be loved by God? The answer here is a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. and for many, the truthful answer maybe ‘No’. If it is ‘Yes’, then from whatever religious tradition one is dealing with a process of conversion, for any love makes demands. “Lex est amor qui ligat et obligat” as Adam of Perseign put it.
Or, is it true that I am a subject of sense experience? One only becomes aware of the question through sense experience, so the judgement here has to be affirmative.
Have I ever understood anything? Here one might go into a panic. I had quite a wise aunt who was prepared to admit that she knew nothing! But if, in English culture, one became specific and asked “Do you know the meaning of the term ‘water’?”, the answer would be ‘Yes’. We have grown up learning to understand things, and in English water is tied up with that wet stuff. We have not only understood but can judge that our understanding is correct.
One might get into deconstructive, post modern mood and say water only means water for English people, but one can point out that terms and meanings develop in an age old collaboration, and that if a doctor dealing with a patient in emergency asks for a bowl of water, your response might be absolutely important, meaning life or death for a patient. The mass murderer might think life or death an unimportant matter anyway. So it is that the ground of significance is love, but love can be concerned about a glass of water given to the thirsty person.
I have been trying to show that concern for appropriate attentiveness, understanding, truth, reality and love belong to everyman be he Hindu, Moslem, Jew, Christian, or nothing in that way. We not only are human, have a human nature, but can confirm the fact through our experience – or be in some way subhuman.
Monday 2 February 2009
Economic Supplement 10
I notice that train travel is going up in cost. The reason given is that capital formation is needed. There is a distinction between capital repair (when things wear out) and capital formation, capital which increases the capacity of the railways to provide services.
Where there is new capital formation there will be new streams of revenue. The railways, instead of charging present customers more, should borrow the money from the banks, which, of course, should only lend where they see profitability, sharing the risk, uncertainty and profit of the outcome.
As a matter of fact, when capital needs replacement the new investment may well embody improvements, less fuel consumption for example. One needs to make a distinction then. The current price being charged for fares ought to cover capital repair. Capital improvement should be financed by ‘capitalists’, banks and any others prepared to share the ‘risk’.
Such a distinction might be described as notional. Something notional though can express an understanding; the understanding can be true; what is true expresses reality; reality grounds morality, responsibility and justice, which includes commutative justice.
The commuters who have ‘inelastic demand’ since they must get to work will find that their disposable income after paying for fares is reduced. So beyond injustice to passengers, the fare rise, in a marginal way, works against the recovery from the slump, since such recovery must envisage consumer demand being able to pay for what the economy can produce, a situation which requires not ‘a fall in inflation’ but a fall in prices across the board.
Commutative justice has to do with where a situation has changed. It is largely neglected by the modern state, but even on its utilitarian principles, is conveniently neglected. Suppose for example the tax threshold was £10,000 per annum. (It is less than that, I am ashamed to say) Suppose in a year prices go up by 10%. If my maths is correct, commutative justice would automatically raise the threshold for tax to £11,000 per annum. Not to respect such an obligation makes the State, even the utilitarian State into a robber baron, St Augustine’s phrase, I think. Commutative justice is a notion that needs activating in a thousand dormant, cobwebby and corrupt corners of our Constitution, flowing in with a power similar to the waters of Baptism.
I have been reading Robert Peston’s book ‘Who Runs Britain’. There are these mega blighters who operate more in billions than millions (note, American billions). They sometimes might bring about an improvement in the performance of a firm but sometimes not, it seems. I applaud improvements of course. But these blighters who cream off millions, according to Peston, are reducing pensions. The State too has been robbing pensions, and the Conservatives were guilty of this, preparing the way for Labour. The huge accumulations for pensions attract the eyes not just of personal profiteers but of the Robber Barons who rule us.
There is the business of rationalisation. The Profiteers like to explain how they are benefitting humanity. The Robber Barons need hardly justify themselves so long as they win the next election. Rationalisations abound. The Pope reminds us, ‘it is good to have a job’, but not any job surely. When rationalisations abound, Lonergan says, ‘what can clear the air but faith’. It is what we give that matters, not what we receive. ‘Where hatred sees only evil love reveals values. At once it commands commitment and joyfully carries it out.’ (Third Collection, 106)
Where there is new capital formation there will be new streams of revenue. The railways, instead of charging present customers more, should borrow the money from the banks, which, of course, should only lend where they see profitability, sharing the risk, uncertainty and profit of the outcome.
As a matter of fact, when capital needs replacement the new investment may well embody improvements, less fuel consumption for example. One needs to make a distinction then. The current price being charged for fares ought to cover capital repair. Capital improvement should be financed by ‘capitalists’, banks and any others prepared to share the ‘risk’.
Such a distinction might be described as notional. Something notional though can express an understanding; the understanding can be true; what is true expresses reality; reality grounds morality, responsibility and justice, which includes commutative justice.
The commuters who have ‘inelastic demand’ since they must get to work will find that their disposable income after paying for fares is reduced. So beyond injustice to passengers, the fare rise, in a marginal way, works against the recovery from the slump, since such recovery must envisage consumer demand being able to pay for what the economy can produce, a situation which requires not ‘a fall in inflation’ but a fall in prices across the board.
Commutative justice has to do with where a situation has changed. It is largely neglected by the modern state, but even on its utilitarian principles, is conveniently neglected. Suppose for example the tax threshold was £10,000 per annum. (It is less than that, I am ashamed to say) Suppose in a year prices go up by 10%. If my maths is correct, commutative justice would automatically raise the threshold for tax to £11,000 per annum. Not to respect such an obligation makes the State, even the utilitarian State into a robber baron, St Augustine’s phrase, I think. Commutative justice is a notion that needs activating in a thousand dormant, cobwebby and corrupt corners of our Constitution, flowing in with a power similar to the waters of Baptism.
I have been reading Robert Peston’s book ‘Who Runs Britain’. There are these mega blighters who operate more in billions than millions (note, American billions). They sometimes might bring about an improvement in the performance of a firm but sometimes not, it seems. I applaud improvements of course. But these blighters who cream off millions, according to Peston, are reducing pensions. The State too has been robbing pensions, and the Conservatives were guilty of this, preparing the way for Labour. The huge accumulations for pensions attract the eyes not just of personal profiteers but of the Robber Barons who rule us.
There is the business of rationalisation. The Profiteers like to explain how they are benefitting humanity. The Robber Barons need hardly justify themselves so long as they win the next election. Rationalisations abound. The Pope reminds us, ‘it is good to have a job’, but not any job surely. When rationalisations abound, Lonergan says, ‘what can clear the air but faith’. It is what we give that matters, not what we receive. ‘Where hatred sees only evil love reveals values. At once it commands commitment and joyfully carries it out.’ (Third Collection, 106)
How to Base Historical Consciousness
From the nursery, by learning a language and attending to what people say, we move into a world mediated by meaning and motivated by value. But are the meanings true and are the values worthy of man?
So the history master is very keen on Agincourt, 1415, and on the excellence of the archers, and the message gets across that war is a good thing, especially if at the cost of 200 lives you slaughter 5000 Frenchmen. But from a Christian perspective this is a lamentable affray between Christian and Christian. The values being inculcated are not sound.
What then are sound values, and how does one find them? If one did find them would they mean the emasculation of man, so that never would he draw the longbow or pull the trigger? In the quest for genuine values ones personal authenticity is at stake. One finds, for example, over the use of force there is a considerable clash of position, ‘a dialectic’, and that the preparedness to use nuclear weapons on cities or dum-dum (explosive) bullets against terrorists means that our establishment has departed from just war theory and from human developments. A clash of values poses problems for conduct. Confucius said, ‘if you disagree with the government, change your country’. I sense that today that advice is not possible for many. In ones living, though, one has to consistently show forth the values one has come to recognise as vital.
Man’s own self, his sense of what he ought to care about, is caught up in his understanding of the world. That world might be cosmological (Babylonian, Ptolemaic, Evolutionary) but a considerable complexity gets added in to ones understanding of the world when one realises that the world of man is historical as well as cosmological. The self too gets correspondingly complex especially as our first formation in the way of meanings and values comes from parents and teachers who themselves are considerably shaped up by history. We take our first identity as well as our name from our background.
As a man leaves his parents and joins himself to his wife so a young person, whether consciously or not, faces a considerable challenge in finding their own way in the wide world. This may result in a considerable falling out and falling silent going on with parents when children are in their late teens. The resources for this great journey may be very limited. There is what they are studying which may be very mechano-morphic. There is the peer group which may be equally lost. In the process of achievement of independence a great deal in the way of faith and morals may be lost.
In a sort of clarification by contrast, I find myself thinking about the Franks who fearless in battle, combined the faith with their martial courage and did a great deal to promote Western Christendom, an achievement symbolised by the crowning of Charlemagne as Emperor on Christmas Day 800AD. Gibbon ascribed the energy of the tribal people to their purity of morals. They got married without worrying about property conditions or earning capacity. They stayed faithful or the male was not able to attend the assemblies where things were decided. They had children and needed action to feed them. The fault they had was not being keen about manual labour! What one sees here is that the vital values informing the community are challenging and informing the individual at every stage.
It is worth noticing here the public nature of religion. It is not just what a person does with their privacy. It shapes up the people, whether they are feeling pious or not. Trollop’s Dr. Thorne is disgusted by the grace said at the Duke of Omnium’s table for most of the people aren’t paying any attention. What Dr. Thorne does not notice is that those present are being reminded that they are Christian, despite their egoistic concerns.
Emile Durkheim, the sociologist, thinks that man cannot really avoid religion which reinforces the basic commitments in a society. But perhaps today one moves from home where there are commitments to school where there are commitments into a sort of unsocial world of higher studies, and then perhaps to a rather narrow corporate world with its own ideology. So, perhaps, our adult life is marked with a relative ‘anomie’, a term derived from Greek, which Durkheim used to describe the individual sense of isolation which can drive a person to despair. What perhaps is happening is that corporate ideologies are taking over from religions and providing a somewhat limited meaning to human life, for so long as a person remains with the corporation. This looks like a sort of breakdown of wider society and therewith of religion.
If religion is so utterly related to society the problem of religious differences becomes problematic, for they would appear to indicate so many different societies living in the same terrain. Today the solution might be thought to have a sheerly secular state. What is required of members is spelt out by the dogmas of political correctness. There are realities to be dealt with and values to be espoused but they are consistently this worldly. The Archbishop of Canterbury recently declared that it would not be the end of the world if the Anglican Church were disestablished. It might though be the end of England or Britain feeling that it was a Christian country.
As the world one lives in gets broader, the religion that can express everything needs to get more catholic. Different elements need to enter the admix. I gather that when Vikings became Christian they still said prayers to Thor when they went to sea. In the course of time those prayers would need to be picked up and rewritten with theological orthodoxy. The old prayers were meeting an exigency of the human spirit, the danger of the sea, the need for protection. This exigency still needs to be met, so long as men go to sea in small boats. Similarly there may be ‘Anglican’ expressions of faith which would need incorporating in a wider unity. It is up to the Anglicans to express what they are. Similarly though there might be English Catholic insights of importance for the wider Church, perhaps the interdependence of laity and clergy.
As one recognises the power of historical consciousness I find myself fearful that values around the sanctity of life get eroded. We already see this with modern, mass destructive warfare, with abortion and in certain old Christian countries, Euthanasia. This could then be extended to certain undesirable types. Contraception and indeed permissiveness are related. If one is referring here to the ‘de-ontological Natural Law’ does one in fact recognise this law and that it is binding without also recognising God? If the whole of reality is just made up of bodies, from sub atomic particles through billiard balls to man – the corpuscular idea – then would there be any reason to recognise the disorder of homosexual acts? True heterosexuality is the norm for having children, but if one does not want children, is there any reason beyond aesthetics for denying physical expression to homosexual affection?
I recall Bishop Grant saying that people would not recognise the wrongness of abortion unless they were converted to God. I suspect that this is true of the de-ontological natural law in toto. Also it is helpful to notice that we don’t arrive in the world with a de-ontological theory: rather we are dealing here with a true theory which is historically conditioned. So it was Salamanca in the sixteenth century which gave us the now neglected rules about the ‘just war’.
Recognising ‘de-ontological values’ is a matter of recognising that God’s will is expressed in his marvellous design. Some churches have slipped here when it comes to contraception, so the matter needs to be more clearly put. It is important to note too that not all values are deontological, for some are revealed, the necessity of baptism for example or the indissolubility and sacramentality of marriage between Christians.
If Durkheim is right and religion is the cement of order in society then it would seem that where there is a very strong business culture there needs too to be a very strong religious culture. I recall Alsace, full of churches and palaces where Popes came from. Despite this history, the Church is relatively moribund compared with the business culture around the vines. I took a businessman out to lunch – he was a good Catholic, but had several colleagues around - so when I said grace I got the impression he was embarrassed.
So the history master is very keen on Agincourt, 1415, and on the excellence of the archers, and the message gets across that war is a good thing, especially if at the cost of 200 lives you slaughter 5000 Frenchmen. But from a Christian perspective this is a lamentable affray between Christian and Christian. The values being inculcated are not sound.
What then are sound values, and how does one find them? If one did find them would they mean the emasculation of man, so that never would he draw the longbow or pull the trigger? In the quest for genuine values ones personal authenticity is at stake. One finds, for example, over the use of force there is a considerable clash of position, ‘a dialectic’, and that the preparedness to use nuclear weapons on cities or dum-dum (explosive) bullets against terrorists means that our establishment has departed from just war theory and from human developments. A clash of values poses problems for conduct. Confucius said, ‘if you disagree with the government, change your country’. I sense that today that advice is not possible for many. In ones living, though, one has to consistently show forth the values one has come to recognise as vital.
Man’s own self, his sense of what he ought to care about, is caught up in his understanding of the world. That world might be cosmological (Babylonian, Ptolemaic, Evolutionary) but a considerable complexity gets added in to ones understanding of the world when one realises that the world of man is historical as well as cosmological. The self too gets correspondingly complex especially as our first formation in the way of meanings and values comes from parents and teachers who themselves are considerably shaped up by history. We take our first identity as well as our name from our background.
As a man leaves his parents and joins himself to his wife so a young person, whether consciously or not, faces a considerable challenge in finding their own way in the wide world. This may result in a considerable falling out and falling silent going on with parents when children are in their late teens. The resources for this great journey may be very limited. There is what they are studying which may be very mechano-morphic. There is the peer group which may be equally lost. In the process of achievement of independence a great deal in the way of faith and morals may be lost.
In a sort of clarification by contrast, I find myself thinking about the Franks who fearless in battle, combined the faith with their martial courage and did a great deal to promote Western Christendom, an achievement symbolised by the crowning of Charlemagne as Emperor on Christmas Day 800AD. Gibbon ascribed the energy of the tribal people to their purity of morals. They got married without worrying about property conditions or earning capacity. They stayed faithful or the male was not able to attend the assemblies where things were decided. They had children and needed action to feed them. The fault they had was not being keen about manual labour! What one sees here is that the vital values informing the community are challenging and informing the individual at every stage.
It is worth noticing here the public nature of religion. It is not just what a person does with their privacy. It shapes up the people, whether they are feeling pious or not. Trollop’s Dr. Thorne is disgusted by the grace said at the Duke of Omnium’s table for most of the people aren’t paying any attention. What Dr. Thorne does not notice is that those present are being reminded that they are Christian, despite their egoistic concerns.
Emile Durkheim, the sociologist, thinks that man cannot really avoid religion which reinforces the basic commitments in a society. But perhaps today one moves from home where there are commitments to school where there are commitments into a sort of unsocial world of higher studies, and then perhaps to a rather narrow corporate world with its own ideology. So, perhaps, our adult life is marked with a relative ‘anomie’, a term derived from Greek, which Durkheim used to describe the individual sense of isolation which can drive a person to despair. What perhaps is happening is that corporate ideologies are taking over from religions and providing a somewhat limited meaning to human life, for so long as a person remains with the corporation. This looks like a sort of breakdown of wider society and therewith of religion.
If religion is so utterly related to society the problem of religious differences becomes problematic, for they would appear to indicate so many different societies living in the same terrain. Today the solution might be thought to have a sheerly secular state. What is required of members is spelt out by the dogmas of political correctness. There are realities to be dealt with and values to be espoused but they are consistently this worldly. The Archbishop of Canterbury recently declared that it would not be the end of the world if the Anglican Church were disestablished. It might though be the end of England or Britain feeling that it was a Christian country.
As the world one lives in gets broader, the religion that can express everything needs to get more catholic. Different elements need to enter the admix. I gather that when Vikings became Christian they still said prayers to Thor when they went to sea. In the course of time those prayers would need to be picked up and rewritten with theological orthodoxy. The old prayers were meeting an exigency of the human spirit, the danger of the sea, the need for protection. This exigency still needs to be met, so long as men go to sea in small boats. Similarly there may be ‘Anglican’ expressions of faith which would need incorporating in a wider unity. It is up to the Anglicans to express what they are. Similarly though there might be English Catholic insights of importance for the wider Church, perhaps the interdependence of laity and clergy.
As one recognises the power of historical consciousness I find myself fearful that values around the sanctity of life get eroded. We already see this with modern, mass destructive warfare, with abortion and in certain old Christian countries, Euthanasia. This could then be extended to certain undesirable types. Contraception and indeed permissiveness are related. If one is referring here to the ‘de-ontological Natural Law’ does one in fact recognise this law and that it is binding without also recognising God? If the whole of reality is just made up of bodies, from sub atomic particles through billiard balls to man – the corpuscular idea – then would there be any reason to recognise the disorder of homosexual acts? True heterosexuality is the norm for having children, but if one does not want children, is there any reason beyond aesthetics for denying physical expression to homosexual affection?
I recall Bishop Grant saying that people would not recognise the wrongness of abortion unless they were converted to God. I suspect that this is true of the de-ontological natural law in toto. Also it is helpful to notice that we don’t arrive in the world with a de-ontological theory: rather we are dealing here with a true theory which is historically conditioned. So it was Salamanca in the sixteenth century which gave us the now neglected rules about the ‘just war’.
Recognising ‘de-ontological values’ is a matter of recognising that God’s will is expressed in his marvellous design. Some churches have slipped here when it comes to contraception, so the matter needs to be more clearly put. It is important to note too that not all values are deontological, for some are revealed, the necessity of baptism for example or the indissolubility and sacramentality of marriage between Christians.
If Durkheim is right and religion is the cement of order in society then it would seem that where there is a very strong business culture there needs too to be a very strong religious culture. I recall Alsace, full of churches and palaces where Popes came from. Despite this history, the Church is relatively moribund compared with the business culture around the vines. I took a businessman out to lunch – he was a good Catholic, but had several colleagues around - so when I said grace I got the impression he was embarrassed.
Economic Supplement 9:
Throwing Money at the Problem
I see that the printing of money which is in no way borrowed is seen as a solution to the slump.
After all is that not what banks do when they create credit? They have so much money, all of which is owed to someone, and so stable are the deposits that they can lend some of the money to a new business setting up, or a business expanding, or a new public works. (They can of course lend money to financial booms in houses or the stock market).
What happens if their investment fails? They have a gap in their books. They owe £x to depositors, and they possess £x-y, where £y is what they lent to the businessman. What if the businessman doubles his money? The bank then has assets of £x-y+2y, or £x+y. Because of creative risk taking the bank has increased not just the money in the economy but the total of enterprises by the successful enterprise the money has financed. The flow of money and goods has increased and with that real achievement, there has been an increase in the quantity of money.
I have suggested that the gold standard we need in bankers is not to finance purely speculative movements, but rather real enterprises with a real chance of success.
There is talk of ‘nationalising’ banks which I hope will be impossible because of the global context of banking, but one can see how a nationalised bank would be operating under political pressure, national and local, and therefore not free to apply a detached economic yardstick. Everyone suffers if new, more efficient industries fail to find finance. The credit crunch came about in some measure because banks came under pressure to lend to certain categories of persons. If banks moved out of speculative into productive loans then the great fall in house prices to perhaps a quarter of their recent levels would help most people over a lifetime to get hold of a house and be free of debt. A substantial, drastic fall in house prices is a boon to be hoped for for nearly everyone. If people have to spend far less on their mortgages they will have far more to spend on the High Street.
I noticed some people saying they would not spend more because VAT was down 2½%. True, they will not greatly notice the difference, but for every £100 spent they would have £2.50 left in their pocket – to buy a bar of chocolate or something.
I rather fear the government getting more and more obligated and paying its debts just by printing money. I don’t suppose the Germans intended a mega inflation in the 1920’s or Robert Mugabe more recently. This though at some stage is where the printing money solution leads.
The commentators fear deflation, for people will delay their purchases of some items. If the crossovers between households and firms are to grow equal so that demand can purchase possible output there probably needs to be a deflation of the order of 10 or 20%. When commentators talk about ‘a fall in the rate of inflation’ they mean continuing inflation of say 2 as opposed to 3%. The need for a fall in prices is nowhere appreciated.
I see that the printing of money which is in no way borrowed is seen as a solution to the slump.
After all is that not what banks do when they create credit? They have so much money, all of which is owed to someone, and so stable are the deposits that they can lend some of the money to a new business setting up, or a business expanding, or a new public works. (They can of course lend money to financial booms in houses or the stock market).
What happens if their investment fails? They have a gap in their books. They owe £x to depositors, and they possess £x-y, where £y is what they lent to the businessman. What if the businessman doubles his money? The bank then has assets of £x-y+2y, or £x+y. Because of creative risk taking the bank has increased not just the money in the economy but the total of enterprises by the successful enterprise the money has financed. The flow of money and goods has increased and with that real achievement, there has been an increase in the quantity of money.
I have suggested that the gold standard we need in bankers is not to finance purely speculative movements, but rather real enterprises with a real chance of success.
There is talk of ‘nationalising’ banks which I hope will be impossible because of the global context of banking, but one can see how a nationalised bank would be operating under political pressure, national and local, and therefore not free to apply a detached economic yardstick. Everyone suffers if new, more efficient industries fail to find finance. The credit crunch came about in some measure because banks came under pressure to lend to certain categories of persons. If banks moved out of speculative into productive loans then the great fall in house prices to perhaps a quarter of their recent levels would help most people over a lifetime to get hold of a house and be free of debt. A substantial, drastic fall in house prices is a boon to be hoped for for nearly everyone. If people have to spend far less on their mortgages they will have far more to spend on the High Street.
I noticed some people saying they would not spend more because VAT was down 2½%. True, they will not greatly notice the difference, but for every £100 spent they would have £2.50 left in their pocket – to buy a bar of chocolate or something.
I rather fear the government getting more and more obligated and paying its debts just by printing money. I don’t suppose the Germans intended a mega inflation in the 1920’s or Robert Mugabe more recently. This though at some stage is where the printing money solution leads.
The commentators fear deflation, for people will delay their purchases of some items. If the crossovers between households and firms are to grow equal so that demand can purchase possible output there probably needs to be a deflation of the order of 10 or 20%. When commentators talk about ‘a fall in the rate of inflation’ they mean continuing inflation of say 2 as opposed to 3%. The need for a fall in prices is nowhere appreciated.
The Universe Desacralised; Human Living Secularised
Man makes use of symbols, words, to express the meanings and values that inform his way of life, his self understanding and his understanding of the world.
Since man is intelligent his understanding of things and the symbolism that expresses it is in development. New words enter our vocabulary – the human genome project – and empower our conduct – the motor car. To drive carefully becomes a new moral requirement. One could be too scrupulous about tyre pressures or too careless. To keep the car regularly serviced helps ensure safety. Our integrity is at stake, our authenticity, but in a secular environment.
Unless one is very technically minded the requirement ‘Drive Safely’ throws one into the hands of other people who know what they are doing, to check the brakes for example. A new ‘symbolism’, a new understanding, brings a new dimension to brotherhood, as people with complementary understanding help each other.
Lonergan has brought about a new understanding about the human subject and with that a new symbolism usually in the sense that a familiar word comes to be used in a very precise way. So ‘deliberation’ is a word known by everyone but it gets used very precisely about weighing up different courses of action.
So do we have here a further instance of secularisation owing to an advance in understanding and symbolism? I think not for Lonergan draws our attention to ‘religious experience’ as an element in our human make up, a substructural element capable of becoming superstructural.
Let me refresh our memory on this distinction between substructure and superstructure. A substructure is an element of our experience which can become understood, and the understanding can then be expressed in concepts and words and come to be valued appropriately in relation to other elements of the substructure or of the world we live in.
A good example is judgement whereby we affirm that some understanding is true. Everyone of course is making judgements all the time. For example last week I mentioned a physicist called Eddington and all of us would accept that in the early twentieth century there was a physicist called Eddington. It is a true statement, a metaphysical statement, an ontological statement. ‘Ens et verum convertuntur’. By some true statements, man ceases to live just in his animal habitat and comes to live in the real world just as it is, not just a physical world but also an historical world, and not just a physical and historical world, but a world called and blessed by God the redeemer from all evil.
Still, not all in the world judge that God is our Saviour, but I think everyone would agree that Eddington existed. The most acute philosopher in the world makes judgements about his bank balance and his current expenditure. Judgement is seen by Gadamer as the conclusion following from a more general principle. So, in Aristotelian fashion one could make a general utterance and then subsume a particular happening and make a judgement. Lonergan though would have us review everything before we come to a judgement, for by a judgement we are posing actuality, something that binds or liberates us, something which sets a context for deliberation and action. Judgement rests on experiential evidence, though in addition to the evidence of sense data, we have the evidence of conscious data.
Someone said, ‘everyone complains about their memory, but no one complains about their judgement’ for to complain about judgement is to admit a sort of madness. The madness might be reaching conclusions when the evidence is not in or it might be failing to reach conclusions when the evidence is in.
We can claim that ‘judgement’ is part of everyone’s experiential infrastructure but it is adverted to in a superstructural way by very few. Once accurately adverted to, since truth converts onto being, we have also a metaphysics of a sort, an ontology. A great deal follows upon building up an accurate superstructure with an awareness of responsibility about this key area of human being – namely that we make judgements.
Lonergan suggests that religious experience is part of our experiential infrastructure. he sees this flowing because God gives all men sufficient grace for salvation. He admits though that religious experience may in some cases vanish completely. It may clash with other elements of consciousness. In some it becomes quite central; and continuous. In this context he speaks of the purgative way, where what is contrary to religion is overcome, and the illuminative way in which ‘the significance and implications of religious commitment are more fully apprehended and understood’ (3rd Collection: 125), and the unitive way where in mortal beings can be seen the fruits of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness and self control.
Religious experience, if it is like other elements of consciousness, may be a feeling which is a cause of dismay or disorientation. Client centred therapy following Karl Rogers would help by naming the feeling, relating it to life and other feelings, understanding its occasions and significance. Such a therapy is surely working towards the building up of a suitable superstructure.
Karen Horney has several thoughts operative at the same time including repressed thoughts which the person knows about. One wonders whether the repression of the thought of God gives energy to the keenness of the atheists. Wilhelm Stekel has several thoughts in a polyphony which crowds out certain thoughts. I wonder if what makes for the dominance of a thought is not only its intelligible content but also feeling? Feeling is a major component in certain apprehensions, for example the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. Maslow writes about Peak Experiences. There may be a strong religious component here as in a wedding service.
Lonergan discusses these psychologists in his chapter on religious experience, so one may presume he thinks they may be helpful. It is strange to reflect that we may have areas of ‘thought’ which we do not think about, so that they lack the appropriate ‘superstructure’.
In Method in Theology, without using the term superstructure he suggests that the appropriate structure is ‘faith’. ‘Faith is further knowledge when the love is God’s love flooding our hearts’ (Method: 115). A faculty psychology, dealing with intellect (truth) and will (love) confines love to what is known. ‘What the eye does not see the heart can’t grieve over’. Following a faculty psychology then the path to God is first faith, believing his revelation, and then love. So we work away, practising our faith, and if we are very diligent God might give us a hint of his love. Such mystic experience must be rare, so while we praise the saints, it would seem somewhat boastful to claim any personal knowledge or experience of what they were on about.
Lonergan replaced faculty psychology (sense experience, intellect, will) with intentionality analysis, which he later described as cognitional theory, and later as a form of phenomenology. This was not a deliberate ploy or an attempt to be clever or awkward. He found as he wrote Insight, that he was doing intentionality analysis. As he went on, he found that man’s life of love was so important that, as with sense experience, it was a source of intelligibility. He quotes with approval Pascal: ‘the heart has its reasons which reason does not know’. The reasons of the heart he calls values, or since right reason can give rise to values (vital, social, cultural, personal) he speaks of a transvaluation of values in the light of love. One is reminded of the phrase ‘post conventional morality’ when one hears of a transvaluation of values. So in Our Lord’s day conventional religious values would attend to the Sabbath in a strict way.
So attending to the data of consciousness in a phenomenological way one finds sense data, schematic images, duties and so forth and then one comes across this area of love which deals with family and mankind as well as God, and this area is so significant that it is a further ground for judgement, deliberation and decision.
The world religions witness to this area in the mythological ages where time and space were dominated by collective religious ideas. So Ayer’s Cliff was a sort of omphalos. So you get religious traditions and leaders and follies. Alongside Pope John XXIII’s teaching that the Church is always in need of reform one might posit that ‘all religious traditions are in need of reform’. The devoted and cruel suicide bomber reminds us how great that reform may need to be, but to be persuasive that reform will normally need to come from the tradition itself.
The daring suggestion, always tentative I think in Lonergan, is that religious experience in any tradition is from the grace of God and so an effect of the redemption wrought in Christ, that all traditions may need reform, do need reform, poses an endless historical task on man, historical in the way of understanding things past, but historical too in releasing a better future.
Since man is intelligent his understanding of things and the symbolism that expresses it is in development. New words enter our vocabulary – the human genome project – and empower our conduct – the motor car. To drive carefully becomes a new moral requirement. One could be too scrupulous about tyre pressures or too careless. To keep the car regularly serviced helps ensure safety. Our integrity is at stake, our authenticity, but in a secular environment.
Unless one is very technically minded the requirement ‘Drive Safely’ throws one into the hands of other people who know what they are doing, to check the brakes for example. A new ‘symbolism’, a new understanding, brings a new dimension to brotherhood, as people with complementary understanding help each other.
Lonergan has brought about a new understanding about the human subject and with that a new symbolism usually in the sense that a familiar word comes to be used in a very precise way. So ‘deliberation’ is a word known by everyone but it gets used very precisely about weighing up different courses of action.
So do we have here a further instance of secularisation owing to an advance in understanding and symbolism? I think not for Lonergan draws our attention to ‘religious experience’ as an element in our human make up, a substructural element capable of becoming superstructural.
Let me refresh our memory on this distinction between substructure and superstructure. A substructure is an element of our experience which can become understood, and the understanding can then be expressed in concepts and words and come to be valued appropriately in relation to other elements of the substructure or of the world we live in.
A good example is judgement whereby we affirm that some understanding is true. Everyone of course is making judgements all the time. For example last week I mentioned a physicist called Eddington and all of us would accept that in the early twentieth century there was a physicist called Eddington. It is a true statement, a metaphysical statement, an ontological statement. ‘Ens et verum convertuntur’. By some true statements, man ceases to live just in his animal habitat and comes to live in the real world just as it is, not just a physical world but also an historical world, and not just a physical and historical world, but a world called and blessed by God the redeemer from all evil.
Still, not all in the world judge that God is our Saviour, but I think everyone would agree that Eddington existed. The most acute philosopher in the world makes judgements about his bank balance and his current expenditure. Judgement is seen by Gadamer as the conclusion following from a more general principle. So, in Aristotelian fashion one could make a general utterance and then subsume a particular happening and make a judgement. Lonergan though would have us review everything before we come to a judgement, for by a judgement we are posing actuality, something that binds or liberates us, something which sets a context for deliberation and action. Judgement rests on experiential evidence, though in addition to the evidence of sense data, we have the evidence of conscious data.
Someone said, ‘everyone complains about their memory, but no one complains about their judgement’ for to complain about judgement is to admit a sort of madness. The madness might be reaching conclusions when the evidence is not in or it might be failing to reach conclusions when the evidence is in.
We can claim that ‘judgement’ is part of everyone’s experiential infrastructure but it is adverted to in a superstructural way by very few. Once accurately adverted to, since truth converts onto being, we have also a metaphysics of a sort, an ontology. A great deal follows upon building up an accurate superstructure with an awareness of responsibility about this key area of human being – namely that we make judgements.
Lonergan suggests that religious experience is part of our experiential infrastructure. he sees this flowing because God gives all men sufficient grace for salvation. He admits though that religious experience may in some cases vanish completely. It may clash with other elements of consciousness. In some it becomes quite central; and continuous. In this context he speaks of the purgative way, where what is contrary to religion is overcome, and the illuminative way in which ‘the significance and implications of religious commitment are more fully apprehended and understood’ (3rd Collection: 125), and the unitive way where in mortal beings can be seen the fruits of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness and self control.
Religious experience, if it is like other elements of consciousness, may be a feeling which is a cause of dismay or disorientation. Client centred therapy following Karl Rogers would help by naming the feeling, relating it to life and other feelings, understanding its occasions and significance. Such a therapy is surely working towards the building up of a suitable superstructure.
Karen Horney has several thoughts operative at the same time including repressed thoughts which the person knows about. One wonders whether the repression of the thought of God gives energy to the keenness of the atheists. Wilhelm Stekel has several thoughts in a polyphony which crowds out certain thoughts. I wonder if what makes for the dominance of a thought is not only its intelligible content but also feeling? Feeling is a major component in certain apprehensions, for example the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. Maslow writes about Peak Experiences. There may be a strong religious component here as in a wedding service.
Lonergan discusses these psychologists in his chapter on religious experience, so one may presume he thinks they may be helpful. It is strange to reflect that we may have areas of ‘thought’ which we do not think about, so that they lack the appropriate ‘superstructure’.
In Method in Theology, without using the term superstructure he suggests that the appropriate structure is ‘faith’. ‘Faith is further knowledge when the love is God’s love flooding our hearts’ (Method: 115). A faculty psychology, dealing with intellect (truth) and will (love) confines love to what is known. ‘What the eye does not see the heart can’t grieve over’. Following a faculty psychology then the path to God is first faith, believing his revelation, and then love. So we work away, practising our faith, and if we are very diligent God might give us a hint of his love. Such mystic experience must be rare, so while we praise the saints, it would seem somewhat boastful to claim any personal knowledge or experience of what they were on about.
Lonergan replaced faculty psychology (sense experience, intellect, will) with intentionality analysis, which he later described as cognitional theory, and later as a form of phenomenology. This was not a deliberate ploy or an attempt to be clever or awkward. He found as he wrote Insight, that he was doing intentionality analysis. As he went on, he found that man’s life of love was so important that, as with sense experience, it was a source of intelligibility. He quotes with approval Pascal: ‘the heart has its reasons which reason does not know’. The reasons of the heart he calls values, or since right reason can give rise to values (vital, social, cultural, personal) he speaks of a transvaluation of values in the light of love. One is reminded of the phrase ‘post conventional morality’ when one hears of a transvaluation of values. So in Our Lord’s day conventional religious values would attend to the Sabbath in a strict way.
So attending to the data of consciousness in a phenomenological way one finds sense data, schematic images, duties and so forth and then one comes across this area of love which deals with family and mankind as well as God, and this area is so significant that it is a further ground for judgement, deliberation and decision.
The world religions witness to this area in the mythological ages where time and space were dominated by collective religious ideas. So Ayer’s Cliff was a sort of omphalos. So you get religious traditions and leaders and follies. Alongside Pope John XXIII’s teaching that the Church is always in need of reform one might posit that ‘all religious traditions are in need of reform’. The devoted and cruel suicide bomber reminds us how great that reform may need to be, but to be persuasive that reform will normally need to come from the tradition itself.
The daring suggestion, always tentative I think in Lonergan, is that religious experience in any tradition is from the grace of God and so an effect of the redemption wrought in Christ, that all traditions may need reform, do need reform, poses an endless historical task on man, historical in the way of understanding things past, but historical too in releasing a better future.
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