Lonergan said “Values are apprehended in feelings” and the English are good at feelings. When Lord Shaftesbury wrote about commonsense he meant a common way of feeling, with its humour, as well as a common way of understanding.
When it comes to understanding, the English are gifted at empirical research and discovery. The rules of the Royal Society for Science (established 1660) tend to determine what is empirical, namely observation and experiment. What cannot be observed or made an object of experiment, is the human feeling itself, though Lonergan, with his General Empirical Method, allows subjective states such as feelings to be a matter of phenomenological record and so the basis for further analysis.
There is a prejudice against subjectivity for is it not prone to provide excuses for anything, is it not just a matter of momentary impulses and so completely unreliable? How can one be in any way objective about subjectivity? Yet the fact is that subjectivity can be trained up to make accurate observations in the laboratory and without subjects fascinated by a question, there would be no discovery.
The way to explore subjectivity would appear to be to apply to it the rules of observation and experiment. It becomes all a matter of stimuli and brain waves.
Generalised empirical method has to deal with the problem that the only consciousness we are aware of is our own, but it is in fact with the help of others that we have entered the world of language and symbols, the world mediated by meaning and motivated by values. This world has an objective character, illustrated by the fact that for certain crimes we go to prison.
The world mediated by meaning and motivated by value is intentional, and so teleological. It is true that the organs of the body have a purpose; the liver, the kidney, and so forth. We may or may not know about this hidden teleology, but when something enters into consciousness, like feeling hungry, we have to do, or not do something about it. The chap who got to seventy stone, understanding that chocolate was contributory, could have reduced his intake. The ancient Greeks thought conception occurred when the North Wind blew down souls. An understanding of conception brings the matter into conscious intentionality. Morality has to deal with what is consciously experienced but also with what is theoretically understood. What is theoretically understood can come to have the solidity of a concrete fact. Our conscious world has an element provided by sense experience and an element mediated by meaning.
What is mediated by meaning may be hypothetical, possible, probable, certain, more certain, or infallible. It is confusing perhaps to discover that there are degrees of certainty. They verge, in some matters, on the infallible. So obesity is related to nutrition, the heartbeat is vital for circulation of the blood, the Battle of Hastings happened in 1066, and for a Christian believer, God became man.
Such reflection is, I think, largely foreign to the English, who, coming upon a problem would like to know ‘the facts’. It would be more intelligent to ask for the data on certain matters and even a question as to how the data were collected. It was Aristotle who said “One swallow does not make a summer.”
The factual world of the Englishman is quite metaphysical in the sense that it goes far beyond what can be seen and touches on atoms and subatomic particles, black holes, big bangs, CO2 emissions, global warming. Hawkins’ book “A Brief History of Time” was for a while on every shelf.
Psychology is a strange world which would appear to show that our conscious actions result from subconscious drives. The Englishman hopes that his sanity will carry him through and perhaps a double whiskey will help the process. Free will and responsibility are matters for judges to decide in law courts. There is good luck and bad luck and good luck is mainly a matter of money and health.
Feelings are activated mainly by sport and politics, traffic jams and the weather. They lie more or less unnoticed in family live but can be activated by a crisis such as sickness. Feelings focus around animals, drink and good meals. The Englishman may be sentimental about animals but leads the world in the hospice movement and the care of the dying.
Sex is a sort of joker in the pack. Its pleasure is made awkward by two facts, procreation, and interpersonal relations – even a crazy malady called love. Procreation is dealt with mechanically by contraception and if that fails (as it often does) by abortion. Any interpersonal relation is a huge check on natural egoism and therefore sex must be placed in an impersonal context based on some sort of financial exchange, whether within or without marriage. Confucius pointed out the problem with women is they become familiar.
Though it is constructed as little as possible on the basis of emotion and as much as possible on financial mutual convenience, the family is the pride and source of identity of the Englishman and if it should unaccountably vanish from around him, its want is supplied by a gossamer of dreams and memories.
The Church is a carry-over from an ignorant past but may somehow be a source of social networking, or even a certain social distinction, the dog collar for example. It moves asymptotically to a point of zero significance which it nearly but never quite reaches. The dogmas which set the path to Heaven and the path to Hell have given way to niceness which reaches out to everyone and which can be ignored by nearly everyone.
To be a gentleman was the nineteenth century ideal; to pay one’s bills, to have a familiarity with the Greeks, never to show one’s learning. I fear this ideal has given way to the charming rogue, who gains an income in some strange way and can afford to entertain on champagne and canapés, maybe even in 10 Downing Street. The black coated banker, model of prudence and propriety, has given way to the high class charmer with his high class bonuses.
I have been painting a picture of ‘English’ life based on the empirical method of 1660, observation, and experiment, but a life which somehow allows emotion to seep through, to provide a basis for the discernment of values. It is worth noticing that among our German cousins, feelings are dismissed as a source of values by Leibniz and Kant. Right conduct emerges from punctiliar knowledge, An exception in the German world is Oitinger, a Swabian pietist, who did not dismiss feelings as momentary affects, but regarded them as expressions of divinely implanted instincts.
Oitinger here is not in line with my understanding of Lutheranism, for I have thought that for Luther human nature itself was fallen, whereas for Oitinger, instinct is a good telling of the divine order and plan. The Catholic idea is that nature is good and therefore its instincts are good, but that nature fallen is darkened in understanding and decisive power and mortal. Oitinger though, got his ideas from Lord Shaftesbury –‘common sense’ – but I think, intensified Shaftesbury in the ecclesial world. In Christ, we are one body – and informing one body, one mind.
Oitinger was a heretic – at least that is how he was brought up, but maybe for us ‘orthodox’ he raises the question of what are the divinely planted instincts in nature? I got a certain resonance with some Confirmation candidates when I suggested “They want to make something out of their lives”. Marriage and family life subordinate to that. Maybe Freudian psychology with its psychological mechanism, should recognise a subordination here. Of course, with St Augustine – “You have made us yourself, dear Lord, and our hearts are restless till they rest in you” – we recognise a sort of instinct to the divine. With Lord Shaftesbury, we recognise a common sense, a movement to the common good, about which there is humour and a mutuality of feelings. Lonergan has our subjectivity in a spontaneous orientation to fellow feeling. He has feeling escorting our subjectivity as a quasi operator in the delight of sensation, the curiosity of enquiry, the detachment of judgement, the emotions needed for decision and action, and the permanent emotional states brought about by religious, family and social commitment. Things known but unseen, like the embryo, fall under this emotions and moral concern.
Monday 15 February 2010
History and Tradition
Tradition is man’s making of man. It is totally engaging and forming from our earliest years even if we reject some part of it. The Church sees tradition and scripture as together forming the source whence flows the Word of God into our hearts. When it comes to history a method is involved in checking some truth or developing an understanding of some event. When it comes to tradition we are dealing with what has already shaped us and so to dismiss some part of tradition is to dismiss some part of ourselves. It is only something one would do with a very good reason – but the Cross which we take up as Christians means dismissing parts of our tradition shaped as it may be by human folly. So an imperialist must give up certain ideas to live in a more fraternal world or someone brought up with uncles replacing uncles has got to reshape his or her life if the sacramental bond of marriage is to reshape their life. Surely it is a great thing if, over a lifetime, a person recognises a fault in their tradition and manages to reverse it.
What is transmitted by tradition is not just a way of life but a set of meanings and values that inform a way of life. The Enlightenment, excited by scientific discoveries, especially Newton’s Mechanics and revolted by religious wars and persecutions, though that reason alone was sufficient to replace tradition. Without realising it the Enlightenment was echoing the dismissal of tradition by the ‘Sola Scriptura’ of the Protestant Reformation, which dismissed the tradition of the Church when it came to Revelation. For some strange reason, for which I suppose we should be grateful, the Protestant movement for the most part did not dismiss the Councils of the Church in the first millennium. Luther though dismissed St James’ epistle as an epistle of straw because of its doctrine on works and the Protestant world felt able to dismiss the Apocrypha, various texts, not strictly in the ancient ‘Law and Prophets’, which the Church found useful for teaching and recognised as ‘inspired’, and so part of the Bible. To someone in this tradition, I suppose the question might arise: is St John’s Gospel inspired? On the positive side it is worth noting that a strict Baptist, who would hold that most of the Bishops at Nicaea were not Christian since they were baptized in infancy, nevertheless holds the doctrine of Nicaea as true. Maybe they would hold that the divine nature of Christ is obvious from Scripture anyway, so it is not because of Nicaea that they hold the Nicene doctrine.
By disregarding tradition, the Protestant world got rid of the need for a Church, and yet has endlessly to define things to give a meaning to the term. By disregarding tradition the Enlightened world has got rid of community except in the enlightened groups who would define what community is and according to their power impose with sanctions and promote with rewards what community is. So community is – the communist vanguard and those who are with them, the Nazi leadership ditto, the capitalist world with those who have sold their soul to the mighty dollar, the permissive world (with the one exception of child abuse) which regards itself as making ‘a civilised society’ (Roy Jenkins). Bend a little here and child abuse will become part of the growing up of every little one into ‘civilised society’. Or, community is – the construction of State Benefits and the only requirement is to fill in countless forms correctly. The world of reason alone proves itself to be the world of reason without a major promise and so it is a world of conflicting world views in which Truth appears to be a matter of power.
Actually, the task of the theologian is not to disparage reason which with corresponding affection is the greatest natural gift of God to man. When I write in with natural affection I am drawing on St Augustine’s work on the Trinity. Man is made in the image of the Trinity. When he understands something true he expresses it. When he expresses it, he loves it. Truth then is not for any subject a mere series of punctilio expressions of what is, like a telephone directory, but it is such that when it is expressed, it cannot but be loved. So someone making up the telephone directory, collecting data from this source and that, and typing in the correct number against the correct name will have a certain satisfaction which is a proportionate emotional experience, a proportionate love. In a day’s work done to perfection, the fact of limitation belonging to the task may be overcome by a great satisfaction. So in the Trinity the eternal expression of the Word, expressing all that the Father is, even unto personhood, grounds the eternal expression of the Spirit, of love, of personhood, who proceeds from the Father and Son.
Man working is not man consuming but man constructing and in constructing an object he constructs his own self. His love grows not just for what he has made but for his own self as maker. In this way work is an erlebneis, an experience which somehow not only gives identity as appreciated but opens to the infinite.
Last week, I suggested that erlebneis might be not just individual – an individual unit of meaning – but also collective – I instanced the Second World War – so that meaning is expressed and satisfaction is experienced by a multitude. If insights coalesce in an individual they can be shared by the group. There is a contagion too of feeling. There is a development of identity. So one gets an historical event, erlebneis, which is communicable to the next generation.
If one can identify such an erlebneis, such an event, one has perhaps a carrying wave of meaning moving into the future, and it is on such a wave that the gospel too, a distinct erlebneis, can be carried.
There is a task here for while a secular event may engage the extreme of love and self sacrifice it is also mixed with frailty and fault. So Evelyn Waugh’s Trilogy on the Second World War finds faith as a thread mingling with absurdity and infidelity.
The genuine values of the carrying wave therefore need to be discerned from so much else, but in that discernment, the values become values not just for one people but for all mankind. Maybe the notion of human rights is a sort of varying wave emerging from the Second World War, but it needs enriching to include the unborn and the frail and it needs broadening to include duties. So by its consistency, by its comprehension and by its sacrifice around this notion the Church bears witness to divine truth but also to a natural truth.
The erlebneis which gives a collective identity may be sad of course – so the Irish Potato Famine or the persecution of Catholics in these islands, but I think with the endurance of trials, there is always a positive side to be found. Those who simply raise the sword and triumph have I think, a problem, for the message can hardly be universalised
I think the notion of a collective erlebneis is part of the Second Enlightenment which is reversing the positions of the eighteenth century Enlightenment for it restores the idea of tradition and helps us understand how we have all been shaped in ways beyond counting and analysis by the history of our people, by the histories of our peoples. I recall an American saying that an undoubtedly good thing in history was the American Declaration of Independence. I did point out it looked different from the English perspective! The carrying wave emergent has to satisfy both sides. Maybe here the carrying wave is the doctrine of subsidiarity. Those in authority should not be too heavy handed. A part of what philosophy can do is to translate a particular good which has been experienced at a particular time by this people or that into a more general proposition acceptable to all people of good will. It belongs to the Church to insist on the goodness and power of reason. She does not generate the contemporary ‘carrying wave’: that emerges from history: she can though promote what is good and point out and condemn what is evil. Rather as a surf boarder used the waves, she may use the carrying wave to express yet higher truths. So the rights of man point to the rights of God and so to sin and righteousness.
What is transmitted by tradition is not just a way of life but a set of meanings and values that inform a way of life. The Enlightenment, excited by scientific discoveries, especially Newton’s Mechanics and revolted by religious wars and persecutions, though that reason alone was sufficient to replace tradition. Without realising it the Enlightenment was echoing the dismissal of tradition by the ‘Sola Scriptura’ of the Protestant Reformation, which dismissed the tradition of the Church when it came to Revelation. For some strange reason, for which I suppose we should be grateful, the Protestant movement for the most part did not dismiss the Councils of the Church in the first millennium. Luther though dismissed St James’ epistle as an epistle of straw because of its doctrine on works and the Protestant world felt able to dismiss the Apocrypha, various texts, not strictly in the ancient ‘Law and Prophets’, which the Church found useful for teaching and recognised as ‘inspired’, and so part of the Bible. To someone in this tradition, I suppose the question might arise: is St John’s Gospel inspired? On the positive side it is worth noting that a strict Baptist, who would hold that most of the Bishops at Nicaea were not Christian since they were baptized in infancy, nevertheless holds the doctrine of Nicaea as true. Maybe they would hold that the divine nature of Christ is obvious from Scripture anyway, so it is not because of Nicaea that they hold the Nicene doctrine.
By disregarding tradition, the Protestant world got rid of the need for a Church, and yet has endlessly to define things to give a meaning to the term. By disregarding tradition the Enlightened world has got rid of community except in the enlightened groups who would define what community is and according to their power impose with sanctions and promote with rewards what community is. So community is – the communist vanguard and those who are with them, the Nazi leadership ditto, the capitalist world with those who have sold their soul to the mighty dollar, the permissive world (with the one exception of child abuse) which regards itself as making ‘a civilised society’ (Roy Jenkins). Bend a little here and child abuse will become part of the growing up of every little one into ‘civilised society’. Or, community is – the construction of State Benefits and the only requirement is to fill in countless forms correctly. The world of reason alone proves itself to be the world of reason without a major promise and so it is a world of conflicting world views in which Truth appears to be a matter of power.
Actually, the task of the theologian is not to disparage reason which with corresponding affection is the greatest natural gift of God to man. When I write in with natural affection I am drawing on St Augustine’s work on the Trinity. Man is made in the image of the Trinity. When he understands something true he expresses it. When he expresses it, he loves it. Truth then is not for any subject a mere series of punctilio expressions of what is, like a telephone directory, but it is such that when it is expressed, it cannot but be loved. So someone making up the telephone directory, collecting data from this source and that, and typing in the correct number against the correct name will have a certain satisfaction which is a proportionate emotional experience, a proportionate love. In a day’s work done to perfection, the fact of limitation belonging to the task may be overcome by a great satisfaction. So in the Trinity the eternal expression of the Word, expressing all that the Father is, even unto personhood, grounds the eternal expression of the Spirit, of love, of personhood, who proceeds from the Father and Son.
Man working is not man consuming but man constructing and in constructing an object he constructs his own self. His love grows not just for what he has made but for his own self as maker. In this way work is an erlebneis, an experience which somehow not only gives identity as appreciated but opens to the infinite.
Last week, I suggested that erlebneis might be not just individual – an individual unit of meaning – but also collective – I instanced the Second World War – so that meaning is expressed and satisfaction is experienced by a multitude. If insights coalesce in an individual they can be shared by the group. There is a contagion too of feeling. There is a development of identity. So one gets an historical event, erlebneis, which is communicable to the next generation.
If one can identify such an erlebneis, such an event, one has perhaps a carrying wave of meaning moving into the future, and it is on such a wave that the gospel too, a distinct erlebneis, can be carried.
There is a task here for while a secular event may engage the extreme of love and self sacrifice it is also mixed with frailty and fault. So Evelyn Waugh’s Trilogy on the Second World War finds faith as a thread mingling with absurdity and infidelity.
The genuine values of the carrying wave therefore need to be discerned from so much else, but in that discernment, the values become values not just for one people but for all mankind. Maybe the notion of human rights is a sort of varying wave emerging from the Second World War, but it needs enriching to include the unborn and the frail and it needs broadening to include duties. So by its consistency, by its comprehension and by its sacrifice around this notion the Church bears witness to divine truth but also to a natural truth.
The erlebneis which gives a collective identity may be sad of course – so the Irish Potato Famine or the persecution of Catholics in these islands, but I think with the endurance of trials, there is always a positive side to be found. Those who simply raise the sword and triumph have I think, a problem, for the message can hardly be universalised
I think the notion of a collective erlebneis is part of the Second Enlightenment which is reversing the positions of the eighteenth century Enlightenment for it restores the idea of tradition and helps us understand how we have all been shaped in ways beyond counting and analysis by the history of our people, by the histories of our peoples. I recall an American saying that an undoubtedly good thing in history was the American Declaration of Independence. I did point out it looked different from the English perspective! The carrying wave emergent has to satisfy both sides. Maybe here the carrying wave is the doctrine of subsidiarity. Those in authority should not be too heavy handed. A part of what philosophy can do is to translate a particular good which has been experienced at a particular time by this people or that into a more general proposition acceptable to all people of good will. It belongs to the Church to insist on the goodness and power of reason. She does not generate the contemporary ‘carrying wave’: that emerges from history: she can though promote what is good and point out and condemn what is evil. Rather as a surf boarder used the waves, she may use the carrying wave to express yet higher truths. So the rights of man point to the rights of God and so to sin and righteousness.
Question and Answer
The way we shape up a question shapes up the answer. Some questions hardly require insight. If I say x = 2 + 2, then I can move automatically to x = 4, but so could a computer.
In the nursery there are questions about the meaning of words. A child learns about 6,000 words by the time he or she is six. It must be a considerable preoccupation to learn about three words a day. Alongside names, there is learning to string them along in sentences and the little one knows he has got something right by the way the adults respond. Through meanings, values, obligations, feelings, we move into a commonsense world which is also historically conditioned. The history of a people has phases of advance or decline. Chastity may be an essential virtue, or permissive ways may seem to be the challenging norm.
The world of commonsense opens to the world of food and drink; farming and cooking; religion and law; television; radio and DVDs; books and opera; working; earning; getting a pension for one’s old age; driving the car and getting it through the MOT; getting a passport. Everywhere there are practical questions and answers to be found. We enter a world which is related to us and which we contribute to. If it is a world of values as well as meanings, then it is a world of right and wrong, a world of obligations and so a world of feelings, of merit or blame, a world in which we live with a clear or guilty conscience. In this world it is worth noticing that if an obligation is not technically specific, it is ineffectual. Some people live in a world where they might kneel down beside the bed to say their prayers but they say them in bed. Some live in a world where they ought to do so, and either do or do not do so.
I think what I have said so far applies to primitive culture as well as that more developed state we recognise as civilisation. Here there are different tasks and skills and rewards, and politics and law sort out right order. With the primitive culture, personal reality is tied up with the corporate structure and its leader – so when David weeps for Absalom, the solders mourn with him, even though they had been happy when Absalom was killed. So ‘The Flag’ in America or ‘The Crown’ in Britain provide a primitive sense of unity in a society grown mega efficient and quite oblivious to an individual story.
Through Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the discovery of mind and the power of the question were released, and the result was a set of categories that could belong to answers to questions. So predicates to subjects were a matter of substance, quality, quantity, relation, action, passion, place, time, posture, and habit, giving dynamism to explain any changes in things were four causes, efficient, final, material, and formal. For Aristotle, the world was perhaps eternal, so he did not, as Aquinas did, have God as what one might call the existential cause. “God made all things, visible and invisible, out of nothing”. (Lateran Council 1215).
The advantage of a theory of causes is that it allows one to answer the question “Why?” with “Because”. “Why?” looks for a reason and “Because” gives the reason for any regular occurrence. The world of chance was for Aristotle not a matter for explanation. Why does a cow have horns? – it is its form. Why is it skinny? – poor matter i.e. poor grass. Why does the farmer keep it? To sell it to the butcher (final cause). Why does he whack it with a stick? To get it to go through the gate (efficient cause).
So for Aristotle everything could be explained up to a point. St Thomas could broaden the field with creative causation with providence, with the supernatural understood analogously to the natural, so that theology became a science which made use of Aristotle’s philosophy as a handmaid. The system sort of broke down before God’s infinity. One can ask what is the form of a cow? but the form of God is simply to be: “I am He who is”. Form as we know it in creatures is a limiting thing – so cows don’t have wings.
Physics broke the mould by asking not about ‘form’ but about the wider aspect of things, about how things relate to each other, how with two bits of matter a force arises between them called gravity, the force depending on the amount of matter and weakening as things are further apart according to not just the distance but the distance squared. Mathematics gets brought in to expound the matter. Restriction to observation and experiment is the rule brought in by the Royal Society, 1660. We enter a world which knows more and more about physics, geology, botany, biology, and the physical aspect of psychology. Such knowledge has made use of probability theory as well as mathematical laws. Upon analysis it is seen to deal with correlation rather than causality. Its capacity is limited by the limited power of telescopes and microscopes. Over the next hundred years or so, one might find it heading asymptotically to a sort of limit. Empirical science one might suggest, with technology, marks our world as modern, with population moving from 1 billion in 1800 to 2 billion in 1900 to 6 billion now. The question one asks in empirical science is “What is the relationship of A to B?”. It is not a question found in Aristotle. It gives a world controlled increasingly by man. Since God is not part of scientific method, there is a tendency in modern culture to agnosticism or even atheism.
Our notion of questions set off in the nursery with words and their meanings. It moves into a commonsense world and then, with Aristotle, into a scientific world much making use of logic. Modern empirical science makes use of logic, but the stress is on method and on a collaboration going on with different sorts of experts all focussed round a new emerging question. Is swine flu changing its spots? Is global warming due to CO2? The detachment with which a question is considered should be maintained even if the answers are apocalyptic – else how should the world of commonsense trust the judgement of scientists?
History proceeds by a different method from the natural sciences but, since the 19th century, it has aspired to a similar status in the world of thought to that of the natural sciences. The Germans, with Geisteswissenschaften, distinguished a new object, the reconstruction of the constructions of the human spirit. History moves beyond the mere facts in their particularity and beyond reliance on reliable testimony, to a collaborative effort which assembles all the evidence about a particular matter. So, while I don’t suppose it has happened yet, one might find an historian using psychological theory and investigating William the Conqueror’s relation with his mother to understand the 1066 behaviour. With historians too, we find collaboration and cooperation around a particular question. Since the object of study is human, the rich human development of the historian is needed for the master. What I have said about history applies to the social sciences in general, I think.
Theology, having with Thomas Aquinas (of 1274), relied on Aristotle, finds itself with a new question, since Aristotle is not the basis of modern science or modern history. What sort of philosophy should it base itself on now that Aristotle has, in an important way, been superseded? The second Vatican Council (1961-1964) did not answer the question, but in an implicit way recognised it, for I think it only quoted Aquinas once. Here is a great question for the Church, which just begins to dawn. God forbid that it should take schism and heresies for it to become clear but maybe current lapses alone make the point. It is essential that the proclamation of the gospel should be clear to everyone, to scientists, to historians and to the multitude influenced by a science dominated culture.
Emergent probability is the realisation that things are in development, even surprising development. It relates not just to the empirical but also to conscious discoveries and artistic achievements. It relates closely to Providence and to hope which sees the endless future of man and his world as in God’s hands. Hope enables one to take on poor situations with a love which is redemptive and so constructive.
Dialectic understanding is that there are different stances in the world and so there is the clash of truth and error. There are positions and counter positions; bias, dramatic, egoistic, group or general, justified itself by some ideology. The conversions, psychic, intellectual moral and religious, give the positions which are assailed by counter positions. The counter positions show up in history rather than science but they crystallise themselves in philosophy. Here the more fruitful option seems to be “develop positions” rather than “reverse counter positions” for such reversal might be very long and tedious.
Conversion to love – in the family, in the wide world, and to godparents, a context of value in which facts are reassessed and in which deliberation seeks the action which expresses and fosters love. Such love itself needs to be explained as far as possible, and the teaching in the community which has long sought to live by this area, given the material for such explications; so Christian faith sees the source of such love in the gift of the Spirit given by Jesus to the Church. Faith and Theology find a vital root in reflection on conversion.
Augustine is credited with saying “Love and do what you will”. He actually said “Love God and do what you will”. We might add, “and act in the real world which you have come to know through all your questions and genuine answers”. Your loving action should then fulfil the petition! “Thy Kingdom Come”.
In the nursery there are questions about the meaning of words. A child learns about 6,000 words by the time he or she is six. It must be a considerable preoccupation to learn about three words a day. Alongside names, there is learning to string them along in sentences and the little one knows he has got something right by the way the adults respond. Through meanings, values, obligations, feelings, we move into a commonsense world which is also historically conditioned. The history of a people has phases of advance or decline. Chastity may be an essential virtue, or permissive ways may seem to be the challenging norm.
The world of commonsense opens to the world of food and drink; farming and cooking; religion and law; television; radio and DVDs; books and opera; working; earning; getting a pension for one’s old age; driving the car and getting it through the MOT; getting a passport. Everywhere there are practical questions and answers to be found. We enter a world which is related to us and which we contribute to. If it is a world of values as well as meanings, then it is a world of right and wrong, a world of obligations and so a world of feelings, of merit or blame, a world in which we live with a clear or guilty conscience. In this world it is worth noticing that if an obligation is not technically specific, it is ineffectual. Some people live in a world where they might kneel down beside the bed to say their prayers but they say them in bed. Some live in a world where they ought to do so, and either do or do not do so.
I think what I have said so far applies to primitive culture as well as that more developed state we recognise as civilisation. Here there are different tasks and skills and rewards, and politics and law sort out right order. With the primitive culture, personal reality is tied up with the corporate structure and its leader – so when David weeps for Absalom, the solders mourn with him, even though they had been happy when Absalom was killed. So ‘The Flag’ in America or ‘The Crown’ in Britain provide a primitive sense of unity in a society grown mega efficient and quite oblivious to an individual story.
Through Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the discovery of mind and the power of the question were released, and the result was a set of categories that could belong to answers to questions. So predicates to subjects were a matter of substance, quality, quantity, relation, action, passion, place, time, posture, and habit, giving dynamism to explain any changes in things were four causes, efficient, final, material, and formal. For Aristotle, the world was perhaps eternal, so he did not, as Aquinas did, have God as what one might call the existential cause. “God made all things, visible and invisible, out of nothing”. (Lateran Council 1215).
The advantage of a theory of causes is that it allows one to answer the question “Why?” with “Because”. “Why?” looks for a reason and “Because” gives the reason for any regular occurrence. The world of chance was for Aristotle not a matter for explanation. Why does a cow have horns? – it is its form. Why is it skinny? – poor matter i.e. poor grass. Why does the farmer keep it? To sell it to the butcher (final cause). Why does he whack it with a stick? To get it to go through the gate (efficient cause).
So for Aristotle everything could be explained up to a point. St Thomas could broaden the field with creative causation with providence, with the supernatural understood analogously to the natural, so that theology became a science which made use of Aristotle’s philosophy as a handmaid. The system sort of broke down before God’s infinity. One can ask what is the form of a cow? but the form of God is simply to be: “I am He who is”. Form as we know it in creatures is a limiting thing – so cows don’t have wings.
Physics broke the mould by asking not about ‘form’ but about the wider aspect of things, about how things relate to each other, how with two bits of matter a force arises between them called gravity, the force depending on the amount of matter and weakening as things are further apart according to not just the distance but the distance squared. Mathematics gets brought in to expound the matter. Restriction to observation and experiment is the rule brought in by the Royal Society, 1660. We enter a world which knows more and more about physics, geology, botany, biology, and the physical aspect of psychology. Such knowledge has made use of probability theory as well as mathematical laws. Upon analysis it is seen to deal with correlation rather than causality. Its capacity is limited by the limited power of telescopes and microscopes. Over the next hundred years or so, one might find it heading asymptotically to a sort of limit. Empirical science one might suggest, with technology, marks our world as modern, with population moving from 1 billion in 1800 to 2 billion in 1900 to 6 billion now. The question one asks in empirical science is “What is the relationship of A to B?”. It is not a question found in Aristotle. It gives a world controlled increasingly by man. Since God is not part of scientific method, there is a tendency in modern culture to agnosticism or even atheism.
Our notion of questions set off in the nursery with words and their meanings. It moves into a commonsense world and then, with Aristotle, into a scientific world much making use of logic. Modern empirical science makes use of logic, but the stress is on method and on a collaboration going on with different sorts of experts all focussed round a new emerging question. Is swine flu changing its spots? Is global warming due to CO2? The detachment with which a question is considered should be maintained even if the answers are apocalyptic – else how should the world of commonsense trust the judgement of scientists?
History proceeds by a different method from the natural sciences but, since the 19th century, it has aspired to a similar status in the world of thought to that of the natural sciences. The Germans, with Geisteswissenschaften, distinguished a new object, the reconstruction of the constructions of the human spirit. History moves beyond the mere facts in their particularity and beyond reliance on reliable testimony, to a collaborative effort which assembles all the evidence about a particular matter. So, while I don’t suppose it has happened yet, one might find an historian using psychological theory and investigating William the Conqueror’s relation with his mother to understand the 1066 behaviour. With historians too, we find collaboration and cooperation around a particular question. Since the object of study is human, the rich human development of the historian is needed for the master. What I have said about history applies to the social sciences in general, I think.
Theology, having with Thomas Aquinas (of 1274), relied on Aristotle, finds itself with a new question, since Aristotle is not the basis of modern science or modern history. What sort of philosophy should it base itself on now that Aristotle has, in an important way, been superseded? The second Vatican Council (1961-1964) did not answer the question, but in an implicit way recognised it, for I think it only quoted Aquinas once. Here is a great question for the Church, which just begins to dawn. God forbid that it should take schism and heresies for it to become clear but maybe current lapses alone make the point. It is essential that the proclamation of the gospel should be clear to everyone, to scientists, to historians and to the multitude influenced by a science dominated culture.
Emergent probability is the realisation that things are in development, even surprising development. It relates not just to the empirical but also to conscious discoveries and artistic achievements. It relates closely to Providence and to hope which sees the endless future of man and his world as in God’s hands. Hope enables one to take on poor situations with a love which is redemptive and so constructive.
Dialectic understanding is that there are different stances in the world and so there is the clash of truth and error. There are positions and counter positions; bias, dramatic, egoistic, group or general, justified itself by some ideology. The conversions, psychic, intellectual moral and religious, give the positions which are assailed by counter positions. The counter positions show up in history rather than science but they crystallise themselves in philosophy. Here the more fruitful option seems to be “develop positions” rather than “reverse counter positions” for such reversal might be very long and tedious.
Conversion to love – in the family, in the wide world, and to godparents, a context of value in which facts are reassessed and in which deliberation seeks the action which expresses and fosters love. Such love itself needs to be explained as far as possible, and the teaching in the community which has long sought to live by this area, given the material for such explications; so Christian faith sees the source of such love in the gift of the Spirit given by Jesus to the Church. Faith and Theology find a vital root in reflection on conversion.
Augustine is credited with saying “Love and do what you will”. He actually said “Love God and do what you will”. We might add, “and act in the real world which you have come to know through all your questions and genuine answers”. Your loving action should then fulfil the petition! “Thy Kingdom Come”.
Human Cognition and Experience (Erlebneis
It is a great task for man to understand himself, for in our total reality we exceed what we can grasp. Our conscious operations have an objective but also a subjective component and we cannot turn back in on ourselves to directly understand the subjective component. We achieve understanding no doubt, but through the strange world of language and perhaps long formed concepts. We make use of sense experience not just for teleological and natural goals such as nourishment, but in order to develop our cultural and spiritual life. (If our conscious living is always sensible, it is also always emotionally charged.) To see our task of self appropriation it may be helpful to glance at angels and at God who have a different mode of cognition.
There are three modes of cognition which attain truth and so come to or possess knowledge of reality, the divine which knows all eternally, the angelic which knows by its own form and by the life of grace, and the human which comes to knowledge through sense experience and the life of grace. The angels share what they have with one another in the movement of aeritime, and may share with humans. Man’s intelligence is in a movement which is cumulative through time. He sleeps, senses, wonders, makes theories, reaches conclusions and with the material basis of the brain with its symbols and language, can retain what it has come to know, and by following a question come to know more. So man’s mind has been described as “potens omnia”. Angels have advantage over man in that they arrive in existence knowing. Man, though, arriving on the scene with a tabula rasa (a clean slate) is set to a development which can only be limited by his own folly. He can retain in memory what he has found. He can move on to further development. Here is a source of hubris or pride – pretending to a development which has not occurred.
In this life man is a contrast because all his natural operations are sense based, because he moves from question to answer and because his knowledge in his memory is not sensibly before him. In our moment by moment existence, we can be unaware of most of what is present within us and unaware of questions which belong to us. When St Paul says we shall know as we are known, he may mean we shall live with, have consciously before us, all that we know. May be this is part of what our Lord means when he says we shall be like the angels.
For man in the world, what he dwells upon is just a part of what he knows and loves. The soldier takes the photograph of his beloved from his wallet and is reminded of a contrasting world, perhaps of what he is fighting for. For many things it is memory itself which provides the material for thought. We are dependent here on emotionally charged phantasm making its way through our censor. Wanting to do something – to remember someone’s name, is not sufficient to guarantee the censor operating properly. We have the knowledge but the filing system is not operating properly.
Perhaps we should consider two censors, one for appropriate emotions and one for the images and words we seek. There may be an emotional block as well as a block on images. So there may be a block on happiness and beauty for this is a time of struggle and only feelings such as the importance of work are to be allowed. In Scotland, in Kirkcaldy, for example, Adam Smith’s birth place, we came across some modern architecture which would seem set there to depress the spirits of the occupants. Or someone might be set on jollity, frivolity and humour in such a way that a serious thought is not allowed to occupy the stage – Oscar Wilde would seem to have a consciousness in this vein much of the time. The censor can of course, be trained through comparisons and disciplines. Helm Holtz in 1862 referred to an artistic – instinctive intuition as making up the “tact” that belongs to the social scientist or historian. I think one applauds the spirit which can face the depths and the grimness of things, but somehow turn them round as perhaps Christ our Lord did when he found His spirit troubled by his imminent rejection but brought forth the image of a chicken gathering chicks under her wings, a homely image indeed. The scientist who turns to theology in a positive way may find that his emotional understanding of the mystery is restricted to the idea of design, of power, of force. The emotional requirement for science is excellent in its sphere but will find it needs to leave itself and become as a little child to speak with feeling and understanding of love, compassion, forgiveness and mercy. There is a divine wisdom about the rich texts of scripture which can help to train the inhumanly set censor.
The fact of two censors, one of emotions and one of images, allows one to understand the parable as a means of getting through to censored consciousness for what could be more ordinary than a vineyard with grapes which are bitter, or a little lamb whose owner was fond of it, or a sower who was careless in his sowing! The image is allowed through because it belongs to ordinary life. It becomes the unwanted instrument of instruction and cause of guilt to wayward consciousness.
I sense that catharsis, an emotional release from drama, may somehow break the emotional censor. There are feelings we have repressed because our concrete circumstances must fail to meet them. There is an ideal love we would like to have for children say – and they come to see us when they are short of cash or need the washing done! With repressed feelings life becomes a bit humdrum, we cough up the cash and do the washing. We recognise the same humdrum in a play – about aircraft and mechanics say – but it ends up with the father saying to the son: “My son. Live!” The emotional repression is overcome.
There is a repression of images which might tell us the truth we want to know; there is a repression of emotions born in upon us by circumstances. I think the illumination of the parable is distinct from the catharsis of the play. In the one case it is understanding that unblocked, in the other it is feelings.
In writing of censors and blocking, I am at the level of what Lonergan would call “faculty analysis”. We have a neural demand system of which we are unaware, a censor or two I have argued, an agent intellect, a passive intellect, a will, all of which are faculties of which we are not directly aware. Intentionality analysis draws on our actual experience. Do you ever try to recall something you know and fail? Do you ever feel life in its routine is flat and that you are not living life to the full?
Opposed to such experiences are the experiences which shape us so that they become part of our awareness of ourselves and the world we live in. Falling in love or experiencing a vocation would be such an event. The German word is erlebneis. Just as physics has its units of mass, force, acceleration so the Human Sciences see an experience of a defining sort as being a sort of unit of meaning. The units though are particular. Though of course, they may combine with one another in memory, since insights coalesce, they cannot be added in some arithmetical way. If insights and imagery can combine so too presumably can emotions, so one can conceive of the heart as being rich in emotional experience and so able to draw on that experience. One can see that the experiences of a life make its capacity and richness. Schliermacher speaks of an erlebneis being a unit of eternal life. Heaven is, in this way, as it were, under construction. It is, one might say, time to start living!
What needs to be noticed is that such experience has been expressed just in an individual way. In community and friendship we share each other as it were and come to live a life together. Thus great events carry a sort of public erlebneis. For example I grew up in the shadow of the Second World War, so that it has become part of my identity, my understanding of the world, the values I hold. I share this reality with many others.
So the first preaching of the Gospel culminating in the paschal mystery is an erlebneis which is collective and communicable to the ends of the earth and time. The first thesis is not only personal and individual but Catholic and collective. “God has visited his people”.
The realisation that our shaping as persons is not just a matter of personal authenticity but is also public and historical raises the question of authenticity to a public and historical concern. The Church is Holy but the question of authenticity is a question about the more local traditions which have given our lives the shaping and meaning they have acquired, so we say with Pope John XX111 “Ecclesia simper reformanda”. In the lives of the saints – Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, “love in the heart of the Church”, and Fr Damien, love shown for the most neglected, show us anew the demand of authenticity. I recall on arriving at a Catholic boarding school the housemaster monk coming in saying, “I am looking for some boys to beat – you, you, and you”. He held a bit of a broken desk. A reign of terror was established!
Fr Geoffrey Holt SJ has just died. He was an historian who collected together the lives of all the Jesuits in recusant times. There was talk of him coming over to talk about Catholic Education in the C18th. I said could he conclude with a statement about Catholic education today. He said “No” so he did not come. That was my mistake, perhaps a costly one, because to understand how people acted well two or three centuries ago cannot fail to help us apply what we have learned to our contemporary situation.
If the object of historical study is seen as quite foreign to us then history can be left to historians. If we experience history as a sharing in the same erlebneis, then history provides vital nourishment for our living today. Our hearts can burn within us, set fire anew by what is old.
There are three modes of cognition which attain truth and so come to or possess knowledge of reality, the divine which knows all eternally, the angelic which knows by its own form and by the life of grace, and the human which comes to knowledge through sense experience and the life of grace. The angels share what they have with one another in the movement of aeritime, and may share with humans. Man’s intelligence is in a movement which is cumulative through time. He sleeps, senses, wonders, makes theories, reaches conclusions and with the material basis of the brain with its symbols and language, can retain what it has come to know, and by following a question come to know more. So man’s mind has been described as “potens omnia”. Angels have advantage over man in that they arrive in existence knowing. Man, though, arriving on the scene with a tabula rasa (a clean slate) is set to a development which can only be limited by his own folly. He can retain in memory what he has found. He can move on to further development. Here is a source of hubris or pride – pretending to a development which has not occurred.
In this life man is a contrast because all his natural operations are sense based, because he moves from question to answer and because his knowledge in his memory is not sensibly before him. In our moment by moment existence, we can be unaware of most of what is present within us and unaware of questions which belong to us. When St Paul says we shall know as we are known, he may mean we shall live with, have consciously before us, all that we know. May be this is part of what our Lord means when he says we shall be like the angels.
For man in the world, what he dwells upon is just a part of what he knows and loves. The soldier takes the photograph of his beloved from his wallet and is reminded of a contrasting world, perhaps of what he is fighting for. For many things it is memory itself which provides the material for thought. We are dependent here on emotionally charged phantasm making its way through our censor. Wanting to do something – to remember someone’s name, is not sufficient to guarantee the censor operating properly. We have the knowledge but the filing system is not operating properly.
Perhaps we should consider two censors, one for appropriate emotions and one for the images and words we seek. There may be an emotional block as well as a block on images. So there may be a block on happiness and beauty for this is a time of struggle and only feelings such as the importance of work are to be allowed. In Scotland, in Kirkcaldy, for example, Adam Smith’s birth place, we came across some modern architecture which would seem set there to depress the spirits of the occupants. Or someone might be set on jollity, frivolity and humour in such a way that a serious thought is not allowed to occupy the stage – Oscar Wilde would seem to have a consciousness in this vein much of the time. The censor can of course, be trained through comparisons and disciplines. Helm Holtz in 1862 referred to an artistic – instinctive intuition as making up the “tact” that belongs to the social scientist or historian. I think one applauds the spirit which can face the depths and the grimness of things, but somehow turn them round as perhaps Christ our Lord did when he found His spirit troubled by his imminent rejection but brought forth the image of a chicken gathering chicks under her wings, a homely image indeed. The scientist who turns to theology in a positive way may find that his emotional understanding of the mystery is restricted to the idea of design, of power, of force. The emotional requirement for science is excellent in its sphere but will find it needs to leave itself and become as a little child to speak with feeling and understanding of love, compassion, forgiveness and mercy. There is a divine wisdom about the rich texts of scripture which can help to train the inhumanly set censor.
The fact of two censors, one of emotions and one of images, allows one to understand the parable as a means of getting through to censored consciousness for what could be more ordinary than a vineyard with grapes which are bitter, or a little lamb whose owner was fond of it, or a sower who was careless in his sowing! The image is allowed through because it belongs to ordinary life. It becomes the unwanted instrument of instruction and cause of guilt to wayward consciousness.
I sense that catharsis, an emotional release from drama, may somehow break the emotional censor. There are feelings we have repressed because our concrete circumstances must fail to meet them. There is an ideal love we would like to have for children say – and they come to see us when they are short of cash or need the washing done! With repressed feelings life becomes a bit humdrum, we cough up the cash and do the washing. We recognise the same humdrum in a play – about aircraft and mechanics say – but it ends up with the father saying to the son: “My son. Live!” The emotional repression is overcome.
There is a repression of images which might tell us the truth we want to know; there is a repression of emotions born in upon us by circumstances. I think the illumination of the parable is distinct from the catharsis of the play. In the one case it is understanding that unblocked, in the other it is feelings.
In writing of censors and blocking, I am at the level of what Lonergan would call “faculty analysis”. We have a neural demand system of which we are unaware, a censor or two I have argued, an agent intellect, a passive intellect, a will, all of which are faculties of which we are not directly aware. Intentionality analysis draws on our actual experience. Do you ever try to recall something you know and fail? Do you ever feel life in its routine is flat and that you are not living life to the full?
Opposed to such experiences are the experiences which shape us so that they become part of our awareness of ourselves and the world we live in. Falling in love or experiencing a vocation would be such an event. The German word is erlebneis. Just as physics has its units of mass, force, acceleration so the Human Sciences see an experience of a defining sort as being a sort of unit of meaning. The units though are particular. Though of course, they may combine with one another in memory, since insights coalesce, they cannot be added in some arithmetical way. If insights and imagery can combine so too presumably can emotions, so one can conceive of the heart as being rich in emotional experience and so able to draw on that experience. One can see that the experiences of a life make its capacity and richness. Schliermacher speaks of an erlebneis being a unit of eternal life. Heaven is, in this way, as it were, under construction. It is, one might say, time to start living!
What needs to be noticed is that such experience has been expressed just in an individual way. In community and friendship we share each other as it were and come to live a life together. Thus great events carry a sort of public erlebneis. For example I grew up in the shadow of the Second World War, so that it has become part of my identity, my understanding of the world, the values I hold. I share this reality with many others.
So the first preaching of the Gospel culminating in the paschal mystery is an erlebneis which is collective and communicable to the ends of the earth and time. The first thesis is not only personal and individual but Catholic and collective. “God has visited his people”.
The realisation that our shaping as persons is not just a matter of personal authenticity but is also public and historical raises the question of authenticity to a public and historical concern. The Church is Holy but the question of authenticity is a question about the more local traditions which have given our lives the shaping and meaning they have acquired, so we say with Pope John XX111 “Ecclesia simper reformanda”. In the lives of the saints – Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, “love in the heart of the Church”, and Fr Damien, love shown for the most neglected, show us anew the demand of authenticity. I recall on arriving at a Catholic boarding school the housemaster monk coming in saying, “I am looking for some boys to beat – you, you, and you”. He held a bit of a broken desk. A reign of terror was established!
Fr Geoffrey Holt SJ has just died. He was an historian who collected together the lives of all the Jesuits in recusant times. There was talk of him coming over to talk about Catholic Education in the C18th. I said could he conclude with a statement about Catholic education today. He said “No” so he did not come. That was my mistake, perhaps a costly one, because to understand how people acted well two or three centuries ago cannot fail to help us apply what we have learned to our contemporary situation.
If the object of historical study is seen as quite foreign to us then history can be left to historians. If we experience history as a sharing in the same erlebneis, then history provides vital nourishment for our living today. Our hearts can burn within us, set fire anew by what is old.
The Levels of Intellect
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.
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.
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.
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