Three Levels Involved in Knowing

Our consciousness is tied to dreaming, sensing, imagining, words, and affections. There is also valuing, deliberating, and deciding. The list is not exhaustive.

One theory might be that knowledge is simply the result of sense experience. I know this place exists because I can see it. I know Australia exists because other people have seen it. On this basic theory there is not only experiencing, but believing others who are trustworthy. People who are innocent of cognitional theory might construct their philosophy around this idea, familiar to them from several years spent in the nursery. So you get materialism, empiricism, sensism, phenomenalism, behaviourism, and pragmatism - but beyond that, an ever present way in which many people understand the human condition. So if you add the fact that some things are pleasurable and some are terrifying, you have a root understanding of much modern culture based on sex and violence: a sort of lowest common denominator which leads to maximum viewing and profits.

Suppose one thinks that the “id” with its censors and opennesses takes its shape beyond the family, the village, the school, the parish from the mass media, you find a powerful hedonistic shaping up going on towards greater pleasure as life’s meaning. Prayer, for example, is at the heart of life which seeks to love the Lord your God with all your mind and strength. It does not feature in our mass media. In a broad way it does not feature in the bringing up of our children and grandchildren. We can here contrast our modern mass media with biblical culture, which shows Moses praying, or David praying. Maybe we need to draw not just on our biblical culture but on our subsequent Christian culture to shape up a world where it is generally realised that it is “Prayer alone that conquers God” (Tertullian). We need to know and express the stories of our saints and martyrs and humble pastors. For example, what happened to the humble priest of Northampton who, in 1902, was given £5 by the Bishop of Northampton and told to set up a parish in Lowestoft? Here is a drama for the BBC!

Man is described as a rational animal, a symbolic animal, a self completing animal. I find helpful to understand the difference between man and animal, the story of some monkeys who were given some sticks they could join together to reach a banana. If both sticks were in front of them, they could empirically see the problem and achieve the solution. If one stick was in front and one behind them, they could not think, “We need another stick to join to this one”. St Thomas Aquinas, rather surprisingly, has a similar case with hounds chasing a fox. They sniff three ways he might have gone, and finding no result head off in the fourth way he must have gone. With monkeys and hounds and all creatures in their degrees, there is an empirically based intelligence which is wonderful in its result.

Animals have imagination of course, so one can see the dog chasing its prey in a dream, but man has control of his imagination, so that faced with the problem of the banana and one stick, he can think “What I need is another stick”, and look around and find it. This imagination upon which man’s mind can work is called phantasm by Aquinas and schematic image by Lonergan. The formation of the appropriate image may be by diagrams if it is a matter of geometry, or by essays if it is a matter of history. “Seek and you will find” said the Lord – the mental working out of things is a large part of man’s seeking, but the labour would not be engaged upon unless there was a real question and some prospect of finding a solution.

A question leads not at first to answers, but to possible answers. It leads to thought not to knowledge. Thought is a whole lot of maybes. So Newton’s theory is a maybe; Darwin’s theory is a maybe; that the universe is 16 thousand million years old is a maybe; that blood circulates the body carrying oxygen is a maybe; that William the Conqueror invaded Britain in 1066 is a maybe; that God made all things visible and invisible out of nothing is a maybe.

The technical term, the virtually unconditioned, indicates that when certain conditions are fulfilled, an object of thought which as such is a maybe becomes something as certain and real as the immediate world around us. So the battle of Hastings in 1066 is a point not just of imaginative thought, but something for which there is evidence, something which is understood in some degree and something which actually happened.

The fact that it actually happened does not mean I can transport myself back through time and become a sort of observer at this past event. Rather, I rely on certain evidences to know about what happened. When I was young, I learned that Harold had an arrow in his eye. I find myself now quite doubtful about this scene and suspect the poor man was in some way betrayed and murdered and the arrow is just an airbrush account to put the best story forward. One sees in this case how a known fact has the solidity of the table in front of me, a definite intelligibility and yet gives rise to further questions.

The difference then between just thinking and knowing is that with thinking one has evidence and a possible explanation; with knowing one has evidence and the only possible explanation. Evidence of one sort and another has so mounted up that instead of wondering about something, one knows about something. So I think most Christians will find themselves knowing that God exists but wondering about what He is like.
Experiencing, thinking, and knowing make three levels of consciousness which are cumulative. Without some sort of evidence, there is nothing to think about. Without something being thought about there is nothing to weigh up and judge: it is so. One can judge without realising one does so. It is one thing to know that there was a battle of Hastings in 1066. It is another to know that you know. Thought which thinks the sum of things to be thought about are sensations, is materialistic. Thought which goes in for theory but is unaware of judgement, is known as idealistic. Thought which is aware of judgement, is called critical realism.

The empiricist takes as data simply sense experience. The idealist takes as data sense experience but also a world of thought. The critical realist combines the data of sense with the data of consciousness to realise that sometimes a theory is simply true.

Lonergan has the thinker moving from the sensible, to the intelligible, to the true and real. I wonder whether the contrast Newman makes between notional assent and real assent indicates that it is possible not to realise that what is true is real. It may be possible to make a series of truth judgements, for example, God is; the Church is Holy; operative grace is radicated in the soul; there was a battle of Hastings, but once sense of reality is confined to the world of animal extroversion as found in the nursery, or to that world plus the world of thought, so that, while one makes truth judgements one does not realise that thereby one is attaining a limited knowledge of the real.

The question becomes, “What world do I live in?” Is it just the familiar world of things which do or do not work, or does my knowledge project me into a wider world of being; a world very largely unseen and in part unimaginable; a world which gives rise to further questions and which promises doom or bliss?