Differentiations and Conversion

There is the world of the nursery and the world of commonsense, and the world of commonsense is invited to conversion, to religious conversion, loving God and neighbour, to moral conversion, respecting values and to intellectual conversion, in the sense of thinking things out and not rushing to conclusions.

Differentiations are historical achievements. So one can recognise a general discovery of mind in Greece, but modern science with its modern dynamism dates to say 1660, the Foundation of the Royal College of Science, or to c1680 with Newton’s mechanics. The Periodic Table for Chemistry, Evolution for Biology, the Subconscious for Psychology have moved the scientific spirit into further areas of empirical method based on observation and experiment. It is part of the same movement to use probability theory or non-Euclidian geometry. The very small and the very large will probably be found to give empirical science an asymptotic limit.

This movement is massive in its demand and its achievement. By 1800 world population achieved one billion. At present it is nearly six billion, fed, medicated, clothed, housed, and educated, for the most part. Great organisations implement the latest technologies and require that their operatives be scientifically trained. Science comes to dominate the curriculum at schools. As one puts on the TV, gets into the car, wears specs, one is benefitting from an enormous theoretical and practical collaboration.

The whole scientific collaboration rests on a commonsense knowledge of causes but the heart of science deals with correlation and frequencies. Freed from metaphysics, it is also free to forget about the first cause and indeed, also about the spirit of man. As a consumer, there is a tendency to take man back into the nursery where pleasure and pain dominate and morality has not emerged. So long term decline manifests itself one way.

Before the revolution which created the modern scientific differentiation of consciousness, there was a similar revolution in the theological world running from say 1050 – 1274, the death of St Thomas Aquinas. This involved Philip the Chancellor’s distinction between grace and nature and Aquinas’ use of Aristotle on matter and form. Each sacrament was analysed as to its matter and form. The achievement came into being without too much realisation of the immense backdrop which led to it; Greek Philosophy monastic discipline, the writings of the fathers, the work of Canon Lawyers who collected judgements and tried to make sense of them. A decadent scholasticism which did not know how to renew itself and keep developing, made perhaps an easy target for the Protestant movement with its Sola Scriptura. Perhaps the fact of a scholastic expertise led to a resentment rather as the scientific movement led to a romantic backlash.

In the 1930s with Maritain, Gilson, Chesterton and others, a return to Thomism seemed the solution – but St Thomas knew nothing about the modern world and the scientific revolution which so largely informs it. The second Vatican Council (1962 – 1965) makes a sort of watershed wherein it was realised that Catholic thought had to get updated. Aggiornamento was one of the phrases. Easier said than done!

The next major differentiation of consciousness goes back to Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They worked hard at history and realised that what they were doing was in some way superior to the natural sciences. Their work went back to the sense of dignity belonging to man in God’s image. “Bildung” expressed the idea of “being in the image”. With Herder’s idea, Bildung was reaching up to humanity; you can see why this effort led to the Modernist crisis. Their aim was expressed as reconstructing the constructions of the human spirit. This might ignore the work of the Holy Spirit.

The final differentiation of consciousness could be described as the modern philosophic differentiation. Philosophy and Theology had worked in close conjunction and logic played a great role in the Scholastic achievement. The fact that nature was distinct from super-nature meant that philosophy had its autonomy from theology to discover. Descartes following Galileo distinguished between Res Cogitans and Res Extensa, man’s implementation of this depending on the pituitary gland. The empiricists, Locke, Hume and Freddy Ayer, focused on the Res Extensa, whereas Kant and Hegel focussed their efforts on the Res Cognitans. In fact I have said that Kant lost the physical universe (The Res Extensa) in his study, which is a bit careless!

Kant brought about a Copernican revolution focussing on the Thinker. The subject became the centre of knowledge. Hegel I think, went further. But there was a reaction as thinkers declared there was more to man than this thought. Kierkegaard, Newman, Marx, Neitsche, Blondel and others in various ways, stressed the importance of action. I think Bertrand Russell ends up in this camp which one can broadly label phenomenological and existential. These philosophers would be handmaidens, not of natural science but of humanity as it should be. Gadamer stresses that we know in art and history in a different sort of way. Lonergan has explored human subjectivity in a richer way than Kant and derived a great deal from St Thomas Aquinas. From him comes the phrase “differentiation of consciousness” creating in great historical movement, theological, scientific, historical, and modern philosophical stances.

These expert worlds easily pull apart, but man in his commonsense dimension (which even experts have to use) most the time has somehow to relate himself to these worlds of expertise.

Genuine conversion, affective, moral, and intellectual belongs in a commonsense sort of way to man – to man and woman – busy in many ways in the world. Affective conversion is a matter of learning to love positively and personally in family life, in civil affairs and in religion. Religious love, open to God, would implement all values. Thus it overrides pleasure and pain as the major principles governing conduct. A good humanist might think it the obvious thing to have an affair with his beautiful secretary but not the one who loves God.

Conversion which is affective and religious, thus grounds moral conversion which since we are not saints overnight may take time to implement. Moral conversion entails a universal concern for what is right, for goodness, and so understanding is challenged both to understand in some measure the gift of love, and to understand similarly right order, the order that reflects God’s love. So the intellect is brought into use. For Christians too, sense and intellect must be used to apprehend and take hold of the grace of Christ in the Paschal Mystery.

For those who are engaged in differentiations of consciousness in a contemporary way, intellect will help the scientist to recognise he deals with God’s creation and the moral order applies to methods of experimentation and how the results of science are used. The historian will find that intellect allows discernment of the mysterious ways of God with man, but for this intellect needs to be informed by faith and so capable of recognising values. The modern philosophic differentiation strangely often does not reflect on intellect sufficiently. For Lonergan the reflective judgement which asks “is it so?” of some theory attains to being when it answers affirmatively. Being presents man with an order in which he believes and by which he is in many ways bound. The lack of a sense of being might give a sense of unboundedness but must often lead to waywardness. Lonergan declared that in the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Northern Italy “being is dead”. He knew the students. Existentialism reigns.