Philosophy

Man has a problem to understand himself because understanding cannot be seen and normally he makes use of sensible experiences as the basis of his reflection. Moreover, any conclusion he reaches is a single judgement and so must fail to capture the richness of his entire being. Through memory though, this entire richness seems to be present and to bear upon any judgement that is made. So the judgement of an historian is said to be artistic – intuitive and reached subconsciously.

There are though, conscious modes of thought and from Aristotle, man found himself equipped by metaphysics and deduction. To know the cause is to know the effect. A difficulty is that to know the effect usually does not give one certainty about the cause. The lawn is wet but it may be because of rain or dew or the water sprinkler. So a doctor’s diagnosis may not be certain, though sometimes it is: the patient is long dead. For Aristotle, knowledge is knowing causes.

Modern science is described not as deductive but as inductive. It goes on correlations. It observes what happens, or creates laboratory conditions in which something happens and finds a formula which expresses what happens. When a cue strikes a ball which strikes another ball, one knows by commonsense what the cause is, but the scientific formula F=MA simply measures things which relate to each other. So the physicist at some point is quite surprised to discover that he does not know what gravity is and why it works. What are the connecting elastic bands which link one material object to another, or are we to conceive action at a distance? Or action in obedience to the Creator?

John Stuart Mill thought that the inductive method could be applied to understanding man and so to social problems. One did not need to understand whether an individual was free: the collective result could be predicted or brought about by certain policies. Allow football on Sunday mornings and religion will decline! I suppose Emile Durkheim’s work on suicide in 1920, which associated suicide with festivities like Christmas and found the correlation valid, would be an example of the inductive method applied to social matters, though in fact he went on to postulate anomic, a sense of the loss of one’s personal value, as a reason. Anyone who has travelled a foreign country and found themselves quite alone knows about anomic. (The word actually means lawlessness and it is the Greek word for sin.) In fact, elsewhere, Durkheim writes about sentiments helpful for the integration of society being fostered by religion. Here again, he is going beyond a purely inductive approach and is into explanations.

The fact is that a society which ran on a purely inductive approach (such as perhaps our own) would just be looking for average results, it could not appeal to moral sentiments (to use Adam Smith’s terms) and so, by the stick and the carrot it could get everyone keeping the speed limit or paying their taxes.

Durkheim though, witnesses to feelings. So too does Lonergan who refers to them as the mass and momentum of our living. They should be trained and refined though – he sees devotion to Our Lady as helping with the refinement of feelings. I have a sense that traditional Catholic culture, with its stress on the intellect and so principles which should guide conduct, tends to see feelings as unruly impulses which are to be brought into order. Maybe though, our sense of God is as much a matter of feeling as of understanding. When St Augustine speaks of our restless hearts resting in God, he would seem to be talking about feeling as well as understanding.

I have a sense that feelings can be related to the world of the nursery, the world of the immediately concrete which translates into the world mediated by meaning and motivated by value. Let’s take food. Some things are experienced as good (chips), and some things as disgusting (vegetables). As you enter the world mediated by meaning, you learn that vegetables are good for you. Here is a value felt by one’s parents as well as understood by them. If one supposes that like language one’s feelings are learned from one’s parents, one now approaches a vegetable with a certain disgust, with an element of understanding, and with an element of feeling. Perhaps the clash of feeling and taste allows a change of taste to begin, informed by feelings coming from one’s parents. Our animal world gets informed by feelings coming from the approving, disapproving, loving adult world and so gets formed not just linguistically but by feelings, which are so strong that in this area they become the mass and momentum of our living and help us develop our spontaneity so that we come to accept there might be something nice about vegetables.

As taught feelings incrementally change, taste and conduct so too the reason for these feelings emerges as understanding develops. Where you have both feelings and understanding you have a value. The concrete world remains but our conduct towards it has changed. If we had been Chinese shaped by Chinese parents, it would have changed differently. We are shaped up spontaneously by the values that formed us – there is the spontaneity of reason telling us why we should eat vegetables but also the spontaneity of feeling that a meal is incomplete if it lacks vegetables of some sort.

Whereas our values affect our spontaneity, ethical principles are a sort of science of values worked and in a high degree of abstraction. “You shall not directly take innocent human life.” There are I think four principles allowing double effect where an evil, unintended result of a good action is seen. The evil should not come through the good. There should be an adequate proportion between the good and the evil. There should be a chance of attaining the good. The evil should not be intended.

Over the course of time one would normally expect ethical principles to guide mature evaluation and decision taking and in this way to affect the spontaneous values that are learned by the next generation. So everyone who knows the story of Elenzer’s martyrdom knows how great is the awe that God inspires in him and that martyrdom is preferable to displeasing the Lord. So God’s holy people are gradually formed by the Word of God. Surprisingly perhaps a religious tradition can decay. Religion I think requires something of philosophy, so Christianity requires a certain reality belonging to this world and something of the human mind being able to understand, to know and to believe. Wider philosophical differences have an effect on ethics and so ultimately on evaluation. If one is a pragmatist one would regard the Elenzer story as rather a waste of a life. He could have pretended to eat the meat and everyone would have been happy If Elenzor was unhappy perhaps a bit of therapy would do the trick or some mind altering drugs.

Lonergan thinks traditions decay because teachers fail to understand. The words are there, the practice may be there but the connecting thread has lost its luminosity. The hungry sheep look up and are not fed. As well as having to undo our own proneness to carelessness, we have to notice and reform what is lacking in what we have been taught. Ecctesia semper reformanda. Lonergan distinguishes psychic, egoistic, group and general bias. General bias leads to a general decline, so in the West we appear to depart from just war theory and the inviolability of innocent human life. Today it seems that in sensitive cases there will not be a public inquest when someone dies unusually. The decline goes on. Group bias leads to opposed groups and egoistic bias leads to criticism from those around. Psychic or better dramatic bias may collude with general bias.

For alongside commonsense knowledge and scientific knowledge which has its explicit methodology, there is historical knowledge which sometimes has an explicit methodology as in archaeology, or in learning a language to read a text there goes on a build up in the psyche whereby major conclusions are built up subconsciously. What makes a good historian is that this is well done. Helmholtz describes an instinctive – artistic induction; memory; authority and psychological tact which “replaces the conscious drawing of inferences”. To this area Lonergan brings the need of conversion, religious or affective conversion which recognises the gift of love, philosophical conversion which successfully relates the concrete world to the world of meaning in a critical realism, and a moral conversion which recognises how values should guide the way we live in a pleasant and sometimes painful world. An atheist or agnostic world deprives man of the notion that values are an integral whole so they lose their demand in the face of hedonistic pleasure. Intellect will focus around only those values still dearly held. Unconverted man is not equipped to arrest general decline.

I suspect that when these three conversions are operative “dramatic bias” is set to be overcome. Doran calls for psychic conversion but maybe what is needed is an understanding of a scientific print, namely the psyche is limited in its energy and intentionality can make too great a demand, or not enough demand, and so generate psychic illness. Our living is set in the context of such knowledge.