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.