Tradition

Human meanings develop in collaboration, practical, social, cultural and indeed, religious. Man considered as “a rational animal” is the same at every stage of his development but considered as belonging to a particular place and time finds he is shaped up by a set of symbols which are formed in him by effort, training, education, encouragement and support. So we might learn to read a musical score and play. It was Wittgenstein who pointed out that as a single musical lesson does not make a musician, so a single lecture does not make a philosopher.

Each individual assimilates his tradition in a particular way and I think it is true to say for most of us that we are more dragged up than brought up with appropriate care for our aptitudes. There is the public education system, which at present fails to see that students are capable of reading and writing. In this respect, electronic devices are a serious danger.

The proposition that where there is collaboration there is a tendency to development is substantially optimistic, though of course, thieves may have honour among themselves and find better ways of robbing the bank. Apart from breathing, almost all the things we use in a daily way have been discovered, shared and passed on to the next generation. How to grow wheat was a discovery and, so too, how to bake bread. The future tense was a discovery and, so too, how to measure time and meet at the next full moon to exchange bread for furs maybe.

A development may be complete or incomplete. By incomplete I mean that the problems arising from a development have not been thought through, so that problems, maybe outweighing the benefits, arise. So the pocket calculator leads to people who cannot add or multiply, and the computer leads to people who cannot write or spell. The TV is a great child minder but it may lead to young ones who fail to speak. The gaining of energy from fossil fuels is not complete as a development if it is building up ecological disaster.

A complete development which is worthy and good, therefore, requires a widespread and critical culture which can see and deal with dangers, with the new situation emergent from a development. So the Mandarins in China refused a match box factory for “we do not need so many matches”. The Mandarins in their critical decisions needed to realise that trade meant they could provide matches for other states than their own. One can see though how problematic progress is, for what about the matchmakers in the other states?

Progress through collaboration is social as well as practical. So the House of Commons places the leader of the opposition more than a sword away from the Prime Minister. Insecurity generated by the trade cycle has led to unemployment payments. Compassion for the bereft has allowed divorced couples to remarry. Compassion for young people has led to abortion nearly on demand. Genuine progress has to take account of the whole scale of values as apprehended, or one is on “the slippery slope”.

As well as living in integrity according to the whole scale of values, religious, personal, cultural, social and vital, one has to pass on the achievement to the next generation. Here one recalls that values are apprehended in feelings, the reason for them is firstly given in beliefs and beliefs are explainable in some degree, though “where God meets man you get mystery”.

When we think of God creating, forming and developing the world, we probably tend to think in terms of physical process, so evolution shows the finger of God producing new material forms. But God works too in the evolution of the world of meaning, so that man attains natural moral truths more swiftly but also attains to revealed truth: “A Virgin will conceive”. The production of the ten commandments as we find them may owe something to the code of Hammurabi; something to Egyptian law; something to different historical circumstances, but we recognise in the spirit of faith that God had an overriding impulse which we call divine inspiration. The Modernist movement of the nineteenth century thought the whole development of Israel and of Christianity must be put down to human development alone.

The world as we find it today is marked by developments of a huge sort which have about them dangerous aberrations. Though Aristotelianism made use of intentionality, it reduced the conscious process in man to a sort of causality. This put a block on the healthy development of theology, which in the scholastic age made use of Aristotle.

The scientific movement developing from Galileo made use of mathematics to analyse movements and accelerations of mass and as mathematics had but one answer so any movement had about it an absolute necessity. The world man lives in seems completely determined by scientific rules, so not only can there be no miracles, but man himself, since he is made of matter, must be completely determined. His sense of free will and responsibility must be an illusion. The twentieth century has seen the advance of new mathematics, of probability theory, of uncertainty but there is a broad tendency for the scientific movement towards agnosticism, towards atheism and towards the control of man for his own good, his “health” as conceived by experts.

The sense of history as a movement forward arose in Israel because the Lord made promises which were not yet fulfilled. As history has got wider in its scope (I think what Hubble was to stars and galaxies, Toynbee was to history, producing civilisation upon civilization) you find an empirical world with all its differences of meaning and value, and so, unless one is a man of strong faith there is a tendency to relativism. What one understands and cares about is just the chance of where you were born and when. Indeed, Toynbee’s huge spectrum makes me wonder if today’s Great Britain is the same country I grew up in.

Philosophy is seen as achieving its autonomy from theology with Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum, his res cogitans and his res extensa, his universal doubt and his clear and distinct ideas. One may claim that philosophies oscillated for a long time between empiricism –“philosophy the handmaiden of science” – and idealism, philosophy a realm of thought, which shows that man cannot know the real. The nineteenth and twentieth century have seen the assertion of praxis, of man in his freedom, in fideism, pragmatism, phenomenology and existentialism. Here the problem is that modern philosophy has very largely lost the idea of being, its structure, and its normal requirement. So Lonergan after lecturing huge classes in Rome could say “In Germany, France, Northern Italy, the Netherlands, being is dead” – part of that death of course is a widespread loss of interest in science. His observation came from teaching clerics, so what is a weakness in culture is also a weakness in the Church. For example, many young people are not married – they cannot see it as a matter of being but just a matter of being happy.

Lonergan thinks we all attain being – come to know being - as when the country bumpkin asks “Is that so?”. In a complex area, the judgement will depend on a heuristic structure. So the question might be what percentage of CO2 is produced by man burning fossil fuels? One has V1 (earthquakes) + V2 (Volcanoes) + V3 (living creatures breathing out) + V4 ..... Vn + M. One can then assert that the percentage is determined by

%
MT
=
VTotal - V1 - V2·····- Vn
X 100
VT
VT
One does research, adds in the figures and reaches a conclusion – maybe 5% or 10% or 50% - I have no idea. But if it was 5% and v/t varied by more than 5% a year, one might make the further judgement – the quantity is negligible. A heuristic structure carefully formulated and filled in after due research gives one the capacity to know what is going on, to make a judgment and so “attain being” – for as Aquinas said Ens et verum convertuntur – or the truth gives you access to being.

Lonergan claims to reach “metaphysics” through “Phenomenology”. When you have an area where your knowledge is growing you observe the different operations which go on attending to the date etc and so you can answer the question “What do I (we) do when I (we) know?”.

There is the further question “Why is that knowing?” which is epistemology.

There is then the question “What do I know when I do it?” which is metaphysics.

Lonergan sees metaphysics as flowing not from abstract principles but from the praxis of authentic scientists, philosophers, historians, people of commonsense, theologians and from an integration of the diverse heuristic structures. All structures, for example, attend to the data, produce theories, weigh up and conclude. We are all in the same universe and can accept the authentic judgements made by others in a normative way.