Lonergan

Myth, Metaphysics, Mystery

2010-05-04T14:43:00.001-07:00

Man is equipped with senses and imagination like the higher animals. He is equipped too, with intellect but does not always and everywhere go in for self-appropriation and so distinguish the operations of intellect from those of sense and imagination. Where the operations of intellect are compacted with those of sense and imagination, you get myth

One might distinguish metaphysics and mystery, for in metaphysics and mystery, the mind deals with proportionate being, and in mystery, he deals with transcendent being and also with the possibility or fact of revelation.

Let us deal first with how intellect works upon proportionate being, and can do so in such a way that intellect is appropriated.

When a matter is being successfully studied two things are going on. Knowledge of the object under investigation is increasing, even if one finds things are less certain than one had thought. The reason that knowledge is increasing is that a method is being applied. Without deliberate attention, intelligence and reasonableness applied in a way which is known to be fruitful knowledge, will not develop. The method itself may develop.

While the scientist or scholar must use a method, he is not bound to reflect on it and master it in the way of understanding why it works. Failing such reflection he is likely to explain his results in terms of imaginable entities. So the whole world is made up of tiny billiard balls which push each other around.

This fall back to imaginable entities is the source of myth, whereas if method is appreciated, a certain conclusion, perhaps a probability judgement, has been attained which is merely a correlation. So heat applied causes temperature to rise. Even in this utterance, I am into “cause and effect”.

Cause and effect belongs to our commonsense world of course, and also to Aristotle who thought when we know the cause we know why the effect must be what it is. He thought this applied to mathematics alone.

Myth is not satisfied with understanding one or two things, so everything gets lumped together in “mythopoesis”, so that a single image accounts for everything. I rather wonder whether the big bang theory might be an example of this. So far as I can gather, no one knows the extent of space which is surely relevant if one is imagining everything starting from one point. Mythopoesis stretches forward to the future - a black hole maybe, or a universe in which everything gets further away. Our faith that Christ will come again gets pressured by the power of cosmic myths.

The realisation that this universe which we know has very special design features, leads to the notion of an infinite number of parallel universes. William of Occam had the precept “entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate” – beings are not to be multiplied without reason – and I think Descartes’ systematic doubt was originally intended to deal with such crazy ideas. Is there any reason why design should not be accounted for by a designer?

The world proportionate to man’s mind is known by a method and if method is understood then the importance of judgement answering the question “Is it so?” comes to the fore. “We all complain about our memory. No one complains about his judgement”. In judgement, we, on the basis of sufficient evidence, recognise a truth, and with that recognition man himself is also thereby delimited.

So when La Place, following Newton, argued for a future completely determined by the present, he was excluding the possibility of human freedom changing the future. A completely materialistic world following mathematical laws implies a completely materialistic man for man is part of the world. If matter can be completely controlled then so, too, can man.

To follow La Place is to be under the influence of a mythic view and to rush to judgement without considering the whole issue. So is it irrational to apportion praise and blame? Commonsense and judges in law courts seem to think not. How do we account for the self-judgement of conscience? If it is an illusion, then perhaps everything, including La Place and Newton, are illusions? One needs to consider all the relevant evidence before making one’s judgement.

The judgement one makes is not necessarily imaginable, but it is subject to the law of non-contradiction and needs to be logically coherent. So we live in a world where some things are more or less predetermined by material circumstances and others are predetermined by mental processes. The question is, is this how it is? The question is not, is this all imaginable?

When it comes to human studies or the geisteswissenschaften one might be clear, and so myth will be at a discount. One of the strange propositions about this area is that our judgements emerge from the subconscious. So if you speak to certain historians, the judgement is already made, miracles cannot happen, so if they are reported, the witnesses must be self deceived or even group deceived.

I did come across a case of group deception. Near Great Billing, a whole family met an airman who had been shot down and killed during the war. The parish priest who dealt with the case found there had not been such an event. He had to deal with the situation of a mutually supporting group who were group deceived. St Thomas’s doubt saves the apostolic witness from this accusation.

There can be group deception about airmen, or about miracles, but similarly there can be group deception going on in groups of historians. A person who spouts forth confidently should have asked questions upon how his mind is made up. There is though, a Narcissistic reinforcement to any bias lying in the approval of colleagues. So for some, the Church based on miracles is negligible but the Muslims using force are part of the historical process. For the physicist the myth might be billiard board atoms and for the historian it might be the idea that force and explosions determine significant events. History is full of colour: there is plenty of scope for myth and mythopoesis.

We do not set out with a knowledge of being – we come to know being in the measure that we can affirm something to be true. So Lonergan leads us, echoing Descartes, I think therefore I am, to the self affirmation that we are sensitive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible, that we are knowers who should see to it that we are diligent in the three distinct operations that lead to knowledge, and then diligent in seeing what we should do about what we know.

There is then, a movement from myth to a careful statement on what we have verified. Knowledge of finite being, is stretched beyond its normal potentiality by an excess of intelligibility. Aristotle said that the situation is like an owl dealing with daylight: There is too much brightness. In that brightness though, we are not dealing with myth but with a reality which grants significance to life. Where God meets man, you get mystery. The medieval saw the accidental area of grace where God meets man as of infinitely greater importance than the substantial area of nature. The contemporary today would probably agree that it is love that gives life its overwhelming significance. The late Lonergan describes this area as “affective conversion” and distinguishes family love, civil love and grounding these, Divine love.

Such love maybe granted at any stage of history so mythic consciousness may reach up to express the matter in allegory. Metaphysical consciousness may express the matter in terms of the Supreme Being. The modern might insist that important as orthodoxy is, more important is orthopraxy. Voeglin sees this matter as expressed in myth, prophesy, philosophy and the Gospel, but is suspicious of doctrine for there is a danger here one is not speaking from the heart.

The one moved by love has found what is more important than myth. For Lonergan, doctrine is essential, for Divine love carries a message with it, so to comprehend Voeglin’s point, Lonergan distinguishes between notional and real assent, Newman’s distinction.

By such love, by philosophic attainment, one is freed from myth but we still have a psychic and emotional nature. Fr Lonergan sees devotion to Our Lady as helping us to refine our whole being in an appropriate way as we deal with mysteries which are to be affirmed – The Trinity, the Incarnation – but which are way beyond the power of imagination to adequately express.

Tradition

2010-05-04T14:41:00.000-07:00

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.

Values and Feelings

2010-05-04T14:39:00.000-07:00

On a traditional view wisdom, dealing with what is certain, gives us the moral order, and prudence, dealing with the variability of contingent events, has to implement what is right, and among the contingent events would be feelings. At the same time devotion, surely a matter of feeling, was highly prized, but one should be prepared to cope with dryness – a lack of feeling. At the same time a continuous lack of feeling was seen as problematic.

Modern psychology recognises a complete lack of moral feeling as psychopathic, an illness of a sort, and so recognises a substrate of feelings as necessary to psychological health. At the same time it is recognised that feelings themselves can be disordered and Karl Rogers’ counselling method would bring about a situation where they are recognised, named, understood and appropriately dealt with.

Lonergan describes thought without feelings as Shakespeare’s “pale cast of thought” and describes feelings as the mass and momentum of our living. At the same time I think that modern life tends to occupy itself with a set of replaceable functions so that personality is largely irrelevant to function and feelings are in abeyance. In terms of mass and momentum perhaps many are half alive. Recognising the situation some may feel alienation and so set the ground for a different sort of future.

There is a development of feelings which may be crushed out or which may go too far and lead to sentimentality and the stars being God’s daisy chain. One may disparage what others already possess and so harm your own development. You may focus on personal attainment in one area so that you lose sympathy and the capacity to relate.

One may claim of feelings that they seek expression. The lover writes poems or does a tap dance. The soldier before battle tests his weapons once again. The penitent seeks absolution. The rapist awaits his chance. Those who love purely catch a glimpse of God and worship.

Lonergan claims that values are apprehended in feelings. At the basis of apprehending the world mediated by meaning and motivated by value is trust and belief. We have an empathy which sets our feelings in resonance with others. Believing others we ask why and if the others explain well we are set on a path of intelligent appropriation of values, of “things that matter”.

We are stirred too by the fine example of others, a leader or maybe a figure from the past like Lawrence of Arabia. I suspect though that the feelings that promote values also arise from within. Man is not under the immediate impulse of instinct like other animals but Oetinger the Swabian pietist thought instincts developed gradually to form an interpretative structure which he identified with Lord Shaftesbury’s “commonsense” – the sense that makes community. For Oetinger this was the sense that allowed a true interpretation of Scripture. Here we come upon a supernatural instinct which the Catholic Church recognises, “think with the Church” but equally, “feel with the Church” – “sentire cum ecclesia”.

The fact of feelings is to do with the fact of bodiliness, so at rest feelings are very basic, such as being cold, or tired or hungry, or comfortable, energetic and replete. We are made though for bodily self transcendence in family love, in love for our people (witnessed to by the soldier, but expressed in countless other ways: “love your neighbour as yourself”). Our relationship with our God in the Christian religion is also bodily, though not only bodily. So Simon Peter finds himself being directly quizzed “Do you love me?” His answer affects the heart of Christ as well as expressing his own. At the end game which lifts us to Heaven, we find our emotions totally involved in the self bestowal we call love.

Emotions then are not confined biological purpose but escort our living in its technical achievements, its social developments, its cultural developments and in its religious developments. St John of the Cross in his dark night of the soul has darkened the world around him but his heart, his emotions are totally involved with the unseen God who works within him.

Lonergan is sometimes seen as a dry as dust thinker, but actually he places the body with its neural systems at the base of all our conscious performance and our conscious performance involves the body and feeling all the way to the self surrender and discovery which is love.

Bodily neural life is organised by the psyche which as such is an unconscious organising power which shapes up what we deal with in consciousness in the way of images and feelings. As the psyche is higher than the neural system, so intentionality is higher than the psyche. As the psyche depends on the neural so intentionality depends on the psyche. In all that we do we are feeling about it. In all that we do we have imaginative equipment at work, particularly, I think one should point out, words. A damaged psyche will limit intentional performance so there is dramatic bias and dramatic conversion which might actually be rather a long and tedious affair dealing maybe with something long forgotten and deliberately forgotten. Actually as Neitsche who went mad pointed out for our sanity there are some things we should deliberately forget, I think in this sane utterance of a later madman, we gain the clue that though the psyche is unconscious and shapes our conscious potentialities as to images, words, feelings it is not immune to influence from our conscious performance. If our psyche is damaged some way, it is through our conscious performance that we might hope to heal it. It is healthy to see any conversion as a long term process, even life long, and this applies to psychic conversion too and perhaps above all.

Lonergan uses the “operators” to describe the movement from sense, to intelligence, to reasonableness, to value laden responsibility and he uses the term quasi-operators to describe the imaginative and verbal and emotional concomitance of facts which keep us interested when thinking about something, which keep us detached from making a conclusion when considering all the evidence, which give us energy and prudence when deciding and performing.

The neural system and the psyche remind us we are bodily and they, at the culmination of the process of development, show us that the goal of love is not some abstract definition but includes a bodily and emotional self donation. We have to keep coming down to the fact that psychically we are bodily and limited human beings capable of but one course of action. When it comes to love the quasi operators are often more important than the operators. This of course can be a cause of folly whether the love is divine, or familial, or for a people and mankind.

When there is a choice to be made, there is often a “wrenching” for part of our emotional love life has to die. You can only watch one programme on TV – or if you switch back and forth you miss something of each. I loved Economics but when the priesthood called, I had to get into a quite different realm of studies – I had, trusting in God, to let things go. A person is in love with two people but can only marry one – there has to be a letting go, and not quite as detached as that of St Thomas More who married the older sister because he did not want to upset her by marrying the younger. A middle aged man feels young again in the company of his secretary – he has to let the temptation die if he is to stay faithful to his wife. The fact that there are values to be upheld mean that there is wrenching to be borne. This is in large measure the meaning of the cross we have to bear if our life is to be an intelligible offering to the Lord (St Ignatius) “If you love Me, keep my commandments”.

So while values arise in feelings, genuine values also have the task of directing the emotional life in a way which is worthy. Fr Lonergan sees the Marian dogmas as helpful here. He sees the main body of dogmas as “The Church making an act of faith and so expressing her faith” when it is threatened as it was threatened by the Arian heresy in the early fourth century. He sees the Marian dogmas, the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption as guiding the devotional life of the Christian away from sin and to the hope of Heaven.
Feelings are the Mass and Momentum of our living whence may arise disvalues as well as values. The intellectual life under its own norms and with the help of faith is purified from error and moved to the truth including the truth of values. Feelings too are typically in need of purification if we are wholeheartedly to pursue the good.

Three Levels Involved in Knowing

2010-05-04T14:37:00.000-07:00

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?

Raising the Viewpoint

2010-05-04T14:36:00.000-07:00

There are three different viewpoints suggested by the three plateaus of history; the practical, the theoretical and the existential. The third Plataeu is not named, so I am using the term existential in an honourable way to name it.

Most men in all ages look out on the world from the practical viewpoint. We live so long because of practical achievements. The Yak must be followed. The city states grew up as a result of agricultural achievements. People worry about the GDP. Rich men assess other rich men by how much money they have got. Many argue we should stay in Europe because that way we can be a super power.

One can see that religion can combine with practicality but very often it is for the sake of a good or better practical outcome. Early Christian converts in the North Sea area still prayed to Thor for a safe journey, I suppose until some kindly monk composed for them a better prayer, addressed to the one true God. One prayed to the Ba’als in Israel for the sake of fertility, and the city state gods, Nannar was at Ur, looked after their cities and helped their armies.

Practicality, though it has an operative area which is efficient and reliable, has a penumbra of uncertainty, so that concern for outcomes gives concern with the gods, or god. The crops may fail, the sun grow cold (or hot!) and there can be few going into battle or danger who do not pray for protection. My grandfather experienced a ship going down and everyone was praying.

The religion of Israel though was not an escort for practicality. Abraham was called to be a nomad, a poor, perilous, virtuous way of life motivated by God’s promise of blessing, land and fertility. Religion is a way towards a new practical achievement, where above all, one is free to worship the one true God.

With Abraham, man’s viewpoint is lifted to the heavens and to others who share the faith, the people of God. The problem of being clannish gives rise to a universal purpose, being a light to enlighten the nations. The call of God with a purpose puts all events in an historical perspective. Man’s mortal life retains its significance even as it becomes just part of a wider significance. The viewpoint covers a past in which God has spoken to his people “in many and various ways”, the present full of promise from the past and a future, somewhat hazy, but God’s plan.

One might find today the majority of people with a practical viewpoint and a few saints in the pew, on the bishop’s bench or in monasteries with an Abraham-like viewpoint and one can envisage a deal of mutual incomprehension, so that the history of events shows up a clash of views.

The development of a theoretical viewpoint in Athens covered the areas which later became known as natural science, theology and metaphysics. Morals were included. St Thomas found himself able to use Aristotle’s metaphysics and his moral conclusions. He made use of his Posterior Analytics so that one science rested on another. The area of knowledge appeared most definite and mainly a matter of deduction.

For Abraham wisdom had been mainly about trusting God, with the scholastic achievement it came to include all that could be known from the universities. In time this led to the Renaissance idea; of the Uomo Universale so that an educated man could be expected to know everything about everything known. So when a member of St Philip Neri’s household of priests was getting a bit uppity, Philip told him to do the cooking and told the cook to do history. The cook, Baronius, became a Cardinal and a famous historian. Perhaps there is more to history than sheer deduction!

In Western Europe a massive development of culture got under way. With the fall of Constantinople, it became heir to the Byzantine achievement as well as the Roman Western achievement. There were new materials to be absorbed. But how one should deal with new materials was not clear to the heirs of scholasticism, even though scholasticism had found its “questions” from diverse and often seemingly contradictory materials.

The scholastic achievement had followed a method in assembling materials, noting contradictions and finding a resolution of the matter. But it had not noted its own method. Similarly, the natural sciences got going noting two key elements in method, observation and experiment, but not the whole of method. Again, historians got going, following a method, and describing elements of it, like “achieving understanding through research”, or “attending to the peculiarity of things”, but common agreement about method waits on the achievement of cognitional theory.

Still we find the Western world achieved a general theoretical viewpoint which included the sciences with scholasticism. The natural sciences freeing themselves from Aristotle’s definitions have used mathematics to correlate object to object. So you have a learned standpoint which may imagine that the sciences having become free from Aristotle man should be free from God too. In the horizon there is a clash between some scientists and religion.

Or, since historians may be tracing the development of some value, say music or democracy, we may find a clash between some historians and some scientists. For the scientist if the thing cannot be observed it does not exist. I came across an historian who, bowing to the empirical ideal, thought the only genuine history could be about population movements and technologies.

As a preliminary to talking about self appropriation and method, I would note that insights can coalesce to give a single world view, but that sometimes they need a further insight to do so. There is a tendency today to schizophrenia. There may of course be an organic basis to this. But the fact that we find different viewpoints in disarray and clash means that the individual, shaped a bit by this viewpoint and a bit by that, may find two modes of thinking within himself, both of which have a validity, but which, since they are in conflict tear the person involved asunder.

An example of viewpoints which clash: about 17 years old I know that F=MA and so a material movement has a material cause. At the same time I knew I was a material being in part and responsible for my actions. How does a spiritual influx affect the material? I have effected a resolution of things through Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, through the Neo Thomistic idea of form shaping up ‘matter’, and so to the reality that man in his intentional material movements is responsible. Several different insights, admittedly broad grey areas, allow me to be at once material and responsible and so free and worthy of blame or credit. Here at least, by integrating thought, by the coalescence of insights, I have avoided schizophrenia, Laus Deo.

In the mid nineteenth century and on, when geometers found Euclid a special case, philosophers turned to human action and choice. There was not a system which could predetermine man. Names are Newman, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the tendency is carried on by pragmatists, Existentialists, Phenomenologists. Typically for this viewpoint, the sciences are not of importance or even the historians – each of us has a life to live and the important thing is to get it right. So Newman drinks to the Pope and conscience, but conscience first. Here he is only echoing the scholastics who taught that one should follow one’s conscience even it is misguided. Conscience is the voice of God. This general movement, comparable to the scientific movement and the historical movement has been termed “the turn to the subject”.

The trouble is that subject turned to has tended to be shallow – one thinks of Nietzsche’s ”will to power”. One has a whole set of further viewpoints, in which, as Lonergan claims of most of Western Europe, “Being is Lost”. His care which shows above all the importance of love whence values are mainly grounded but which shows also the value of truth and the realisation of being and man’s condition, and which shows further the quest for truth and the collaboration needed to attain it, allows us to envisage a universal standpoint which provides a horizon within which there are many dynamic movements, theological, scientific, historic, practical, persuasive, many of which at present clash.
A key point is that developments are collaborative even though the collaboration is across space and time. So Lonergan who died in 1984 helps me, and I never met him. A question is, how does “The universal viewpoint” relate to the Magisterium, the teaching authority of the Church? It is a divine blessing that each of us has a pastor to listen to us and to guide, and this is true of the age. I would say that the universal view point recognises the possibility of the supernatural and of revelation. Perhaps as Aristotle was to Aquinas, so the universal viewpoint is to the Magisterium. The universal viewpoint has the advantage that it commands the attention of all men of good will. The Magisterium finds in the exigencies it expresses, matters of concern and a standard which must be measured up to in expressing divinely revealed truth.

The Makeup of Man: Nature and Plateau

2010-05-04T14:35:00.000-07:00

Man straddles the universe composed of body and soul matter and spirit and by grace sharing in the divine nature. Yet he knows himself in terms of the knowledge he has of his world, cosmological and historical. Typically, self-knowledge is limited to the practical plateau and so to a pragmatic and hedonistic schema. If he is kept on this plateau, he can be ruled easily by the stick and the carrot.

On the cultural plateau various terms have come in with psychology after the last 112 years. Relevant terms are “body”, neural system, psyche, id, ego, self, intentionality, self-transcendence, self completion, affective conversion, moral conversion and intellectual conversion, subject, subjectivity, personality.

The psyche oversees the transition from the neural to the conscious and intentional. It is the locus of feelings, of images, of words, of memories, of dreams which can occupy a night, or dreams which can occupy a lifetime of folly or wisdom. It is trained in taste and maybe averse to pasta or to any cruelty. Feelings can be trained up and passed on through empathy. A language is learned so the healthy psyche escorts intentionality by giving us the apt word at the apt time. Insight typically is into a schematic image which draws on sense experience but reshapes it so that an appropriate intelligibility emerges. The schematic image needed for understanding politics is different from that needed to give the precision appropriate to mathematics. Both come with the collaboration of the psyche.

The psyche is the locus of judgements which have been made, of principles which are adhered to, of personal values which express a lifelong commitment. It takes time for character to be so formed. Helpful to understand this is the idea that insights coalesce.

An example of insights coalescing would be that the addition of a number to itself, say N times, can be expressed by addition but more simply by multiplication. But if one’s insight is a verified insight which has been weighed by the question “Is it so?” and so affirmed as part of the concrete universe (so the alps are prone to snow), or part of the notional universe (so certain additions can be expressed as multiplications), or part of the moral universe (I had better avoid that temptation) or part of one’s set of personal, affectionate values (I had better do some history and say the rosary).

The task of the psyche is thus enormous. It is the ground of the entire universe as you have come to know it, the ground of questions no longer interesting for you know the answers and of those which will never be interesting for life is too short, and, importantly of those which are interesting, for perhaps some progress has been made and some remains to be made.

One’s horizon, emergent from the psyche, should be coherent, but if one has not attended to things duly, has rushed to judgement here, failed to judge here it may ground complexes which are inconsistent, to which extent one’s character is split. Drives have been admitted which are incompatible with the gospel. They are commanding. One is a wretched sinner and from one’s own resource there is nothing one can do about it. A grace is needed. There maybe something analogous about a human relationship. There is a rift, and it so affects one that one cannot just put it right. An event, something analogous to a grace, is needed – one may rescue a child from the fire and end up no longer disliked but a hero.

The psyche can grant interest, a feeling about some area, but of itself it does not raise a question. The business of questioning and finding answers belongs to our conscious performance going where it has never gone before. If we know an answer, we cannot, except as a rhetorical device, ask that question. A question goes beyond the present content of the psyche to what is not known. It engages the whole person in his conscious performance. I suspect that normally a question is not considered except out of a decision e.g. I ought to find out how much I have in the bank before I buy that new coat.

The psyche assists the questioning process. The process itself involves questions for intelligence (how often, why?); questions for reflection, is it so, is it not so?; and questions for decision – shall I do this or that? The psyche provides the feelings which help intentionality, so it provides a feeling of curiosity for questions for intelligence; it provides the serenity to answer the rational question “is it?” and to base one’s answer absolutely on the evidence; it provides the emotional concomitant to perform some noble or ignoble deed.

Without new questions and answers, without new deeds the psyche is caught up in a repetitive routine and the result is depression. Cardinal Newman’s statement “To live is to change, to be perfect is to have changed often” envisages a sort of newness belonging to a life well lived – new questions lead to new answers and decisions – and we find in Scripture the Lord making all things new. The German ideal of Bildung has the idea of moving to an ideal, whether the image of God or Herder’s “image of humanity”. The English C19th ideal of a gentleman perhaps expresses perfection attained which would confine the psyche and be depressive. Utterly repetitive jobs must confine the psyche.

Fr Doran though sees depression as coming about another way. The psyche as source of imagery and emotion is a finite resource, so if one gets hyperactive on some project the resource runs out of steam. So the character moves from a manic phase to a depressed phase so that the psyche can recuperate through having a rest. I think an awareness of this polarity in oneself- psyche as a principle of limitation and intentionality as a source of almost unlimited possibility – gives one a certain responsibility for psychic health – for oneself, for one’s family and perhaps for one’s people. Diocesan life or parish life could suffer from too much routine or too much activity.

It is not without the psyche providing feeling and image that man moves to the life of love – for family, for people, for God. Lonergan calls this affective conversion, a life of union “in which we are lifted above ourselves and carried along as parts within an ever more intimate yet evermore liberating dynamic whole.”

“Lifted above ourselves”: there is a new flood of meaning to the whole of our life, including its normative exigencies, be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible. Such love might be the love of God, or of spouse and family or of mankind, perhaps in some political process. Such love arises in the content of normal exigency, which already tests integrity: so the cobbler’s son falls for the milliner’s daughter. I see the raising up of love as somewhat like a stone being lifted up in a stream and washed clean as it is carried along. So love is purifying but the purification is a closer attention to the exigencies of what it is to be human, to the norms of intelligence (did I really understand?) of reasonableness (did I really weigh all the relevant evidence?) and of responsibility (do I respect all the values I have come to know of?) Such lifting up is repentance since what is unworthy of existence charged by love has to be dismissed. There is perhaps a wrenching of emotions. There is a movement from drift to commitment in which one is taking the ultimate flow of things (God’s love moves the stars, Dante) as one’s true direction.

In such lifting up, the psyche is no doubt busy and at full performance. The whole direction of life is being found, so rest will be found. But if one is into a succession of such affairs not carried through in commitment, then the psyche will be exhausted and maybe a cynical attitude escorts a permissive world.

Increasing intimacy .... our destiny is not solo performance and solo glory, it is part of a splendidly collaborative world stretching back in time, so the intimacy is with Isaiah and maybe Keats as well as with the Holy Father, one’s spouse and the Green movement. The whole world, as it achieves integrity (through being lifted up) and holiness (which lifts us up) finds itself as part of a single stream moving to a single point, from alpha to omega.

There is to love, rest, peace, achievement, security and indeed happiness. To this, the Sabbath points. There is the sharing of things human and things human, and the sharing also of things human and things divine.

The point of rest here is a point of activity but a point of activity in a way beyond question and so belonging to the psyche in its orientation to the world. The point of rest is not a matter of norms but a matter of normalcy where those fruits of the Spirit ”Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Fidelity, Gentleness and Self Control” have been taken over by the psyche on the process of accumulated wisdom and so rule conduct and irresistibly set in motion wider movements toward redemption.

If any love is intimate yet liberating, intimacy suggests rest and liberation, action. Here is a balance which needs to respect the psyche as needing rest yet escorting intentionality. So Christian life typically moves between contemplation and action.

The Gradualness of Intellectual Conversion

2010-05-04T14:33:00.000-07:00

“Destroy a man’s illusions and you destroy his happiness” – so wrote Hubert van Zeller, a famous monk. It is a statement which makes me wonder. Is the real world so frightful we need illusions to make it bearable? Should one encourage a person in their illusions to make them happier yet? Our Lord’s words appear in a stark contrast: “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free”.

The first thing about van Zeller’s remarks is it would seem to mean, “go gently with your brother”. He has shaped up a world in which he has a place and the construction has been lifelong. About 30 years ago I recall talking to an Indian who had just arrived here. He had letters to English grandees and was sure that somehow they would sort him out. His attitude seemed to me feudal, but it was so much part of him that I suspected he was on his own in this country. Probably he had best make his way to the job centre!

Lonergan writes that we all live in our world since man’s life is being in the world, but it is far from true that we all live the world as it really is.

The Emperor Justinian accepted his wife’s explanation as to why she was naked with her lover. He loved Theodora so much he could think no ill of her. But here the illusion led to murder when Theodora chopped up her housekeeper’s body and dropped it in the Bosporus least she should spill the beans. Adolf Hitler’s “illusions” led to genocide. There comes a point where illusions need to be pointed out but the truth is that in some cases the pointing out will not destroy the illusion. Chesterton writes of a madman in a lunatic asylum who is rejected because he thinks he is Jesus Christ. The fact that he is rejected confirms his case since Christ was rejected.

Perhaps a way of understanding how illusion and truth can mingle in our apprehension of the world is to reflect in dreams, conscious dream and hope. Hope undergirds our activities but since we cannot see the future there is a dreamlike quality about our hopes. To express our dreams can galvanize others, so Martin Luther King’s famous speech set of: “I have a dream”. Ezekiel in exile dreamed about the future Temple. The more immediate the reality the less the power of the dream though. So I don’t think one can dream, about the future of the parish or one’s immediate family – rather plans are looked for. Maybe I am wrong here though, for a senator can dream that his son will be president.

Maybe a dream about the end can affect present conduct with a surreal and even immoral quality. So if you are an MP it is alright not to declare your mortgage is paid off because obviously in terms of wealth you make a mistake paying it off. An egoistic dream has led to egoistic conduct.

So Freud had it that what the id is, the ego is to be. As I understand it, the id is the subconscious source of images and feelings. Some things are censored subconsciously, some things are promoted subconsciously, and so the ego emerges. If one equates the id with dramatic bias, then the ego has much to do with individual bias. The sense of the self as one has a project of one’s existence into the future is thought to take shape interpersonally. The group you belong to helps you see what is possible and what is not. So the self, drawing from the group, easily becomes subject to group bias. There is then the spirit of the age which easily carries on general bias – so “progress” becomes simply technological advance and economic output.

A bias involves some sort of distortion of the truth. So a false philosophy such as pragmatism is likely to escort the biased world. The world we live in begins to tell us how to think so I think one can see that, alongside religious conversion, moral conversion and intellectual conversion can be hard to achieve and indeed pose a lifelong task.

What is intellectual conversion? Lonergan refers to Cardinal Newman and his distinction between notional assent and real assent. Notional assent allows one to give the right answers and pass one’s exams. Real assent changes the world you live in. So a state of religious apathy can lead to lapsation. One has all the answers but somehow they stop meaning anything very important. One does one’s homework rather than coming to church – or perhaps reads the Sunday papers. Lonergan associates real assent with a sort of enlightenment. One realises that one really does personally need help from God.

Intellectual conversion was shown by Aristotle when he said “Dear is Plato, but dearer still is truth”. Plato thought we understood because we had seen the archetypes. Aristotle realised that the world around us was directly intelligible and produced four causes which allowed us to answer “Why?” with “Because”. So you had material, formal, final and efficient causes.

St Augustine found himself having to struggle with heretics but also to grasp more perfectly the mystery of the Trinity. Man’s task was to seek the truth and with God’s help, find it. Close to Plato, he thought finding the truth was a divine illumination. By contrast, Vatican One has a theologian seek the truth diligently, piously, soberly but the mind itself has the criteria to recognise the truth.

St Thomas Aquinas seeks the truth alongside St Augustine but has the proposition that truth gives one access to reality. He refers to ens, to being, and is making the same point as Cardinal Newman. In 1215, the Lateran Council had declared that God made everything visible and invisible out of nothing, so I think Aquinas has God through creation causing existence as another sort of cause. A unicorn is a sort of being – it can be thought about – but it does not have existence.

Scholasticism had set off with questions – one recalls Abelard’s 157 propositions which were contradicted in his “Sic et Nom” but it ended up a matter of true propositions and logical deductions. In fact St John Fisher or Erasmus applied themselves diligently to Greek and Hebrew but Catholic culture as a whole was vulnerable to the Reformation appeal to a return to Scripture. The most learned of Catholics thought it sufficient to write commentaries on St Thomas Aquinas. Aristotle’s “Posterior Analytics” showed how one science was related to another with Metaphysics at the heart.

The natural sciences made their own way forward and Charles II’s establishment of the Royal College in 1660 made natural science a matter of observation or experiment. With the prestige of wonderful discoveries, philosophy became the handmaiden of natural science and lost its hitherto close touch with religion. The task of philosophy seemed to be to explain how scientific knowledge was possible. The spirit of the age moved to Enlightenment and the Church found herself unrecognised, at the edge of a culture where the dynamics appeared to be protestant and enlightened.

This culture lost its way. The certainties vanished. For Riemann, Euclid’s straight line geometry was a special case. For Heisenberg uncertainty and probability became part of the heuristic structure. The “iron law of Economics” dissolved with Lord Keynes in 1936. The Protestant “sola scriptura” which had provided so simple a way to save your soul has hit a revolution in historical studies, so that you cannot really expect to understand what a text means simply by reading it. Catholicism has become part of the shakeup of modern culture. In 1879, Leo XIII’s evangelical “Acteni Patris” had looked to St Thomas Aquinas as a solution to modern philosophical and ideological confusion. The Second Vatican Council though (1961 – 1965) quoted St Thomas Aquinas but once. Thomas died in 1274. He was ignorant of modern science, modern history, modern psychology, and modern philosophy. The Council saw that the Church had to live in this modern or post-modern world.

As an old fashioned Catholic, I find it reassuring that Lonergan is expert in Aquinas. He realises it takes lifelong dedication to be a top notch scientist, historian, philosopher, theologian and he uses the term “differentiation of consciousness” to describe the result of such long term application.

In each area, and also in the area of commonsense, alongside the causes of being there are the causes of knowing. These are different in each field. About each there is probability, certainty, and about some things a degree of certainty one can call infallibility where one is dealing simply with the truth. The realm of science and the realm of history are “moving forward”. Some things are known I think, but many positions are in development.

So with commonsense I may be certain about the winner of the Grand National, but realise my certainty is not utter. In natural science, I may be utterly certain about what needs doing to repair the Hubble Telescope or a leaky heart, but wondering about Einstein’s Special Relativity. In history I may be utterly sure about 1066 as the date of the Norman invasion, but have questions about William’s motivation or how Harold died. In the Christian faith I may be utterly sure about the Trinity or Papal infallibility but yet not sure about how the Holy Father should exercise his authority. In philosophy I may be quite sure about the norms of attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility, but not clear what to do about knowledge which is so clear. Questions keep life moving and make it interesting.

Foundations

2010-05-04T14:31:00.000-07:00

Around 1230, Philip the Chancellor of Paris made a distinction between grace and nature, the highest thing in nature being reason, but man could be supernaturally informed, by faith, hope, love, and other virtues such as prudence.

Nature, of course, belongs to all mankind. Today, man finds himself chronically and dangerously divided not just by secular issues and ideologies, but also by religious divides, for example, between the Moslems and the Christians. The idea of nature though provides common ground, so most diseases have cures which are not based on religious differences.

Nature though for Philip included man’s rationality and so the precepts “be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible, be in love” express what Lonergan calls the transposition from faculty analysis to intentionality analysis.

The transposition is from terms and relations that are beyond man’s direct experience to terms and relations which are verifiable in experiences as part of experience.

So Aquinas has “agent intellect” and “passive intellect”, but we have all experienced what it is to be puzzled and what it is to be certain. Aquinas’ terms have a base in metaphysical theory. Lonergan would have us draw foundational terms from our concrete experience, and so bring us to use our own mind and heart with greater confidence. This goes on at the level of nature, but a nature which is opened to and influenced by super-nature. How this openness works in a Hindu, or Moslem, or Christian tradition is for the respective faithful to discern, and the respective theologians to expound.

The foundation we are proposing then is human nature known by human experience, and the experience we find is something dynamic not something static; something historically conditioned not something abstract; something potentially creative not something simply determined.

Of course medicine studies human nature, but here a theoretical knowledge develops which is common to all so that what is discovered conditions man, though it might liberate him from this or that disease. There are diseases to entrap the human spirit though, dramatic bias; egoistic bias; group bias and general bias. These biases work to prevent the unfolding of the human spirit towards the intelligible; the true; the real; the good; the loving and the lovable.

That which weighs most heavily on the human spirit and yet which elevates it above all is the loving and the lovable. Here is found the immeasurable meaning of a life. It may or may not include the religious dimension. Nothing is loved of course unless it is known, except love itself. Here is the dimension to which all religious traditions bear witness. The words of Pascal are helpful: “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know”.

Such love is a starting point not a conclusion of reason. It is experimental not theoretical. It could lead man astray into a sort of spiritual bias so that man undervalues his natural potentialities and perhaps a whole culture might become fatalistic and irresponsible. “What will be, will be”. I think one is discerning a further bias here – in addition to Lonergan’s dramatic, egoistic, group and general – namely a religious bias which so disvalues man’s natural capacities so that through regard for religion man’s normal capacities to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible become disregarded in their normal operation. It might be thought that such a malady could only occur with Eastern Religions but in his essay on ‘The Subject’ (2nd Collection) Lonergan lists Western culprits in the names of “phenomenology, existential self understanding, human encounter, salvation history”. There is the danger of a truncation of human subjectivity. Perhaps some aspects of the charismatic movement would come under criticism here.

Let us call this “religious bias”. It does not of course mean that nothing should be attended to, thought about, concluded upon but such a bias closes the door to genuine developments going on in science, history, art, philosophy and theology. A church or religion can in this way retain a visible unity but contain incompatible positions having lost the possibility of fruitful dialogue. I suggest such bias can go on in quite strange ways. There is a “Christian Bookshop” near here which as far as I can see does not have a single Catholic author. I recall a Catholic dismissing a book written in the 1960’s by a Fr Tyrell because a Fr Tyrell had been a Modernist in the 1890’s.

There is no doubt when a person is religiously converted, they are concerned to maintain what has become the most significant part of their life. I have come across people whose children have become Moonies and who will only read Mooney literature. So it is surely a healthy thing that, since the Council of Trent, the seminary training for the Roman Catholic priesthood has involved two years spent on philosophy alongside six years spent altogether.

However, what we are looking for is a development in philosophy which requires a shift to intentionality analysis, so the philosopher begins to recognise objective norms belonging to subjectivity. So, to be an artist one had best use one’s eyes; to be a scholar one had best read the texts. Beyond the texts though, the scholar must use his judgement. I find myself facing the question, might a certain portrait actually be of Mary Tudor; might it be by Holbein; might the date be 1537? A possibility might be overridden by a fact. A probability can be added to by another bit of evidence. If one is looking for certainty, I think it is good to recall Aristotle’s advice, that one seeks different sorts of evidence in different areas. One expects demonstration from a mathematician but not from a politician. Nevertheless it would be madness for a Holbein scholar to deny that he knew that any Holbeins were by Holbein, or to doubt the existence of Holbein.

It is the area of judgement which is most difficult for modern man to recognise, I think largely because modern science which occupies such a huge realm of modern thought is in many revisable. Einstein has gone ahead of Newton in general and special relativity, but I think in our small group we have seen that his special relativity needs revising. The constant in science is an empirical method. If one is to reach scientific conclusion, it needs to be on the basis of evidence, even if it can be revised and improved upon.

If the area of judgement is difficult for modern man, so that metaphysical principles, for example “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts”, seem as doubtful as Einstein’s special relativity, then intentionality analysis, attending to the data of consciousness as well as the data of sense, finds that judgement belongs to our human existence all the time. So there is the intimate and personal question of love. Do I know what it is to be loved and to love in return? Have I any notion of what it is to be loved by God? The answer here is a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. and for many, the truthful answer maybe ‘No’. If it is ‘Yes’, then from whatever religious tradition one is dealing with a process of conversion, for any love makes demands. “Lex est amor qui ligat et obligat” as Adam of Perseign put it.

Or, is it true that I am a subject of sense experience? One only becomes aware of the question through sense experience, so the judgement here has to be affirmative.

Have I ever understood anything? Here one might go into a panic. I had quite a wise aunt who was prepared to admit that she knew nothing! But if, in English culture, one became specific and asked “Do you know the meaning of the term ‘water’?”, the answer would be ‘Yes’. We have grown up learning to understand things, and in English water is tied up with that wet stuff. We have not only understood but can judge that our understanding is correct.

One might get into deconstructive, post modern mood and say water only means water for English people, but one can point out that terms and meanings develop in an age old collaboration, and that if a doctor dealing with a patient in emergency asks for a bowl of water, your response might be absolutely important, meaning life or death for a patient. The mass murderer might think life or death an unimportant matter anyway. So it is that the ground of significance is love, but love can be concerned about a glass of water given to the thirsty person.

I have been trying to show that concern for appropriate attentiveness, understanding, truth, reality and love belong to everyman be he Hindu, Moslem, Jew, Christian, or nothing in that way. We not only are human, have a human nature, but can confirm the fact through our experience – or be in some way subhuman.

Matter, Form, Potency and Act

2010-05-04T14:28:00.000-07:00

I think it is an object of surprise to notice that matter is always formed. The form is intelligible, so certain rocks are where they are because of glaciers, and my car is where it is because I parked it. Many objects have man-made forms; cups, saucers, cookers, and motor cars. The matter has been shaped up according to engineering and contemporary ideas of elegance and perhaps economy. Historians deduce a lot about an age from artefacts which have survived; a flint, a coin or a stamp. Minerals, plants, and animals have natural forms, which speak of design as well as evolution. Each type of creature depends on a supporting environment, so perhaps evolution should be seen as one ecosystem following on another.

St Thomas said that the world around was matter and form, and more form than matter. How though should we think of matter? One could say matter is whatever one abstracts from when considering a question – one is hunting for the intelligible, for the form. On the other hand, wood is the matter you use in making a chair. Yet the wood itself has a form and willow differs from oak and oak from mahogany. With E = MC2 and energy being generated from radioactive matter, some people think of energy as being matter in its irreducible state, but in fact you find that energy always has a form, in heat or momentum, for example.

I suspect that it is out of naïve realism that we imagine we should be able to look at matter as if it were a lump of pure, unformed stuff. If one defines matter as transformability – which is an intelligible definition, then you have a universe in which some things which we call material can be transformed into other things, and some things, like persons, cannot.

The advantage of matter being defined as transformability is that one can see at once that the whole universe, including matter, is intelligible and so can proceed from the wisdom of God by a creative act; whereas if the universe has a non-intelligible component – matter – then it looks as if there is something which did not come about through God’s wisdom and creative decision.

I have quite a strong impression that it is this idea of matter as non-intelligible which lies at the root of much modern atheism. Intelligibility emerges from matter perhaps by random chance. Human consciousness is seen as an epiphenomenon of matter and for Marx that consciousness is caught up in the dialectical materialism of class war. Whereas Galileo had primary qualities which were intelligible, extension and mass but not colour, for Kant such primary qualities are thought up by the mind and what gives rise to the phenomena is not known. The unintelligibility of matter means that the intelligence of man, which is witnessed to by Galileo and Newton, tells us nothing about reality. I think one can see how existentialists reached the conclusion that existence precedes essence. We decide what to do in a universe which is free of moral norms. With such an attitude one can “understand” concentration camps and weapons of mass destruction. I suspect Shakespeare anticipated all this with his remark, “Nothing is but thinking makes it so”. With regard to all this, I find Descartes a little on the side of the angels, for his ‘principle of universal doubt’ did not extend to God, for he argues against indestructible atoms, for “if they had extension, God could divide them”.

Undoubtedly, Descartes has been used to dismiss the Church. Maybe his doubt was something like Occam’s razor: “Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate”. Certainly in Descartes’ day there were ladies who considered that a whole universe might fit into their earring. The First Vatican Council urged theologians to proceed “diligently, piously, and soberly” and maybe a “sober” approach to reality is what Descartes was urging. So it is not sober but fantastical to imagine that by chance unintelligible and unintelligent matter could produce an intelligible world order. It is true that a ‘sober’ approach to reality in Descartes’ day or our own, might pay not too much attention to this, or that theological argumentation or philosophical argumentation. One could spend one’s life getting to grips with Bultman or whomsoever.

The universe proceeding from Wisdom itself and being thoroughly intelligible manifests not just brilliant constructions but the mind of man, a created participation in what God is, wisdom and love, moving from potency – the tabula rasa – to act, in the process of which dramatic, egoistic, group and general bias, effects of the Fall, must be overcome, and recognised anew, and overcome again. “Forgive us our trespasses”, we need to say.

Because of the biases and their power, the good society is rarer than the good man. The one set on integrity finds himself typically swimming against the tide. The association and friendship of those moving to the self transcendence of truth and love is essential if a way forward is to be found for everyone.

One recalls Milton’s phrase: “The hungry sheep look up and are not fed”. The practical life of a business, a lawyer, a plumber and so forth, can be extremely demanding and rewarding, so that higher values get crowded out. “I have bought a farm and cannot come”. A strong established religion, as perhaps in Alsace in its heyday, with clergy and monks, Holy Days and Obligations, can perhaps remind everyone that even if they are building better barns, they have a soul to save. I suspect that today religion is on the fringe.

We are prone to blame secularisation, but actually if one considers Alsace, is not the problem more the decline of religion? The religious house needs to be put in order and grow strong so that everyone recognises the call to holiness and to charity. Not only is man called to be transformed by the love of God, but also to be transformed in his own operations so that he shows forth that love. Operative grace, God’s first gift, leads to co-operative grace where God helps man who has the initiative. There is then a realm of personal values where man responds to God and to himself and to the whole of creation, and so ceases to be simply preoccupied by his work. This is the area where St Peter discovered his weakness for we need God’s help to respond to values worthily even when we recognise them. In the achievement of values we recognise personally we often need to co-operate with others – for example, in getting our children educated, and so the area of personal values easily comes under the influence of group basis. St Peter wanted to be just part of the crowd.

One operates in the world as one knows it, but one lives within a horizon and from a viewpoint. The horizon can be broadened by judgements which are true. So there was a Battle of Hastings, 1066. The viewpoint can be raised by self-appropriation, so it is on the evidence, on the account, and on the generally held belief that I come to knowledge. Intellectual conversion which recognises self-transcendence in attaining knowledge takes one into the wide world of values and beliefs which are held, and so into the culture to which one belongs, from which one learns and to which one contributes. In this cultural world, in achieving a common yardstick for belief, one helps religion to become more generally credible. In this area one might hope to help others move from materialism and from idealism to the critical realism which holds the universe to be intelligible and knowable, which can recognise bunkum and false arguments. J K Chesterton operates in this area.

Culture validates and criticises a way of life with its families and firms, its lawyers and Parliaments, with its workaholics and drop-outs. The way of life knocks people into shape and hopefully allows a person to find a place, a niche, and here, while there is scope for egoism, it can be shamed out as perhaps we are seeing with Parliamentarians at present. Society is a give and take and most people learn to give as well as take.

Being shaped by society are the vital values of the ecology and human spontaneity. Here we find the possibility of psychic conversion but perhaps good social values; finding something to praise in everyone helps people to a more laudable spontaneity. When, at the age of five, Tony McHale our late Deacon, was put on a table to sing and clapped he opened up in a musical way for the rest of his life, even to inventing a tune for a psalm as he sung it at a funeral.

If all intelligibility emerges from matter by chance, then values must be restricted perhaps to health and income levels important as these are. We have found the highest value to be religious facing general bias. Individual values coming from religion or from conscience we found a prey to social bias since many individual concerns must be pursued with others. Cultural values, resting on personal but also generally held knowledge we find resting on (an implicit?) intellectual conversion and opposed by materialism and idealism. To follow the pattern one would identify individual bias as the problem, for an egoist will find it interferes with his life to admit wider values. Following the pattern, social values have to contend with dramatic bias, with the way people are shaped up to think or not to think. So the Cathedral in Constantinople was pulled down by the Reds and the Greens chariot racing fans in about 450AD.

We have a hierarchy of values, religious, personal, cultural, social and vital, and envisage trouble coming from below and healing from above. Fr Doran sees each level of value having to maintain equilibrium between limitation and transcendence. To give two examples, at the level of personal values, a person can be involved in too much. They exhaust the psyche and fall into depression. Or doing nothing, they get depressed. At the level of social values, there is a tension between practicality and inter-subjectivity. A people could get so fond of talking that they neglect work, or so fond of working that they grow dull. The bias from below distorts the balance, so chariot racing takes over from proper work.

First Principles

2010-05-04T14:27:00.000-07:00

We all grew up under the influence of Aristotle so the first science is metaphysics and first principles are metaphysical. I recall being much influenced by the proposition “omne ens est bonum”, every being is good, a proposition very acceptable to a Christian, for God made everything out of nothing. I recall wondering a bit about the mosquito. I met a chap who was studying mosquitoes legs. I suppose in the Paradise to come there may be a swampy area where mosquitoes play a key role in the emergence of dragonflies. That there should be strange wild worlds which are not directly to man’s convenience, is somehow a relaxation to the human spirit with its areas of utilitarian convenience.

For Lonergan the first principles are not abstract propositions but concrete human persons in their authenticity which consists of religious, moral and intellectual conversion operating maturely in the areas of commonsense and religion and, in certain cases, operating creatively in an area where consciousness is differentiated, artistically, scientifically, in a scholarly way, in the way of self appropriation.

In looking for religious conversion as a starting point, Lonergan is rather similar to St Bernard who asked whether someone was seeking God when they wanted to be a monk. An earlier Egyptian abbot had a lot of young men who were avoiding military service. He accepted them on the basis that their motivation could be changed.

In our contemporary society many of us are more dragged up than brought up and so religious conversion is perhaps a minor theme in the polyphony and cacophony that makes up our human consciousness, pulled now this way and now that and largely unaware that conscious deliberation and decision has a role to play in shaping the sort of person we will be and the sort of consciousness we will live from.

Religious awareness of some sort, maybe perfunctory, precedes religious conversion. For example, when I had measles I was close to death but I was also aware of being close to God. I would suggest that religious conversion brings together these experiences, so that here there is something we should do something about. A religious tradition may help the wayward way consciousness freely flows to become aware of this most important dimension.

Religious love is, one might say, of the same stuff as family love and love of one’s people. In the sacrament of matrimony, human affection helps to a deeper love at a divine level. If one sees someone stirred by love for a whole people – one thinks of Fr Damien and his lepers, or those who visited the sick but were rewarded because, the Lord said “you did this to Me” – then you see love which comes from God and leads to Him.

We love all sorts of things from popcorn and pop music to ice cream and Georgian architecture maybe, but I think one can contrast such love with the deep loves which give meaning and concern to one’s living. To be without deep love is to have lost a sense of meaning to one’s life. Not in any way to adequately express deep love in at least some way is to feel personally inadequate. It is a feature that love which is deep seeks to express itself in words, symbols, deeds.

Religious conversion is a turning around from a situation where ceremonies and even religious experiences, or experiences of being loved, are taken for granted to a situation where one recognises deep love as giving the central meaning and direction to one’s life. With the idea that life has a direction one gets the idea that some things would be counterproductive, inappropriate and plain wrong. You get the ground for moral conversion.

Lonergan, in Insight, expounds the precepts “be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible” I think one can move from responsibility to action with the further precepts “deliberate, evaluate, decide, act”. It is an important question, where does love, or where does deep love, come in?

Our conscious life is grounded in the psyche which produces images and feelings in an appropriate way or, of course, maybe in an inappropriate way. Sense experience, intelligence, reasonableness, responsibility Lonergan calls “operators”, but the operators only work properly with an appropriate help from the psyche which provides the images needed for insight and the feelings which lead one from one level to another. So a person has a problem, but attends to it because he feels curious and is restless until he shapes up the glimmer of a solution. I think we can see love as the quasi operator emerging with the precept, “be reasonable”, and guiding the process through being responsible, deliberating, evaluating, deciding and acting.

The precept “be reasonable” finds God as the cause of all being and of our own being. I can recall being told how grateful I should be to God for sight and feeling and so forth, but though I could see I should be, and I believed, I did not feel grateful, therefore I suspect my emotional life was with some reason caught up in another direction. Prayer though around the basic position – God has been good and is – might allow the appropriate feelings to emerge. Better souls than mine have experienced dryness in prayer. They endure it seems for a time nothingness. I think what is going on is that the psyche is learning how to deal with the invisible in its affectivity. I always will remember the old gentleman who answered me “I praise Him for the wonder of my being”, when I asked how he was.

Rationality gives us a structure of reality and an affective response. God’s grace is beyond our affective response yet tied up with it. Bishop Grant used to say “When God meets man you get mystery”. Responsibility gives us an overarching goal and measure which our actions should promote: “The kingdom of God”. Deliberation divides up all the issues as they are known, with consequences of this action and that, and also as a factor, likelihood they will be carried through Evaluation has certain well known principles: “Innocent human life may never be directly taken” – “A man who divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery”. Evaluation is also where “the heart has its reasons which reason may not know” (Pascal). This may be to do with marrying Suzie even she has no fortune, or pouring out one’s life as a libation (St Paul). I am suggesting that some of the reasons which reason does not know may be profoundly theological and ecclesiological, such as celibacy. Evaluation presents options of high virtue, modest virtue and of course sin. Traditional moral theology has been to do with the avoidance of certain well know sins and the performance of essential duties. Through deliberation and evaluation, we come to the world as we know it and the positive actions which might belong to us, as well as the negative we should avoid.

There is then decision and performance which may be life-long. I think one is not normally bound to the highest option but to a good one. The difficulty of carrying out a course of action will be facilitated by recalling the process of deliberation, evaluation and decision which went on. We find man in his freedom can be influenced by God to make his life benign, benevolent, fruitful and even redemptive.

Religious conversion results from the gift of God’s grace. Moral conversion makes its way on the basis of religious conversion. Intellectual conversion may make its way on the basis of Religious and Moral Conversion. In the process of life one comes to know things and with religious conversion one comes to believe things which cannot be adequately imagined, like the Blessed Trinity. So with religious and moral conversion one may hope to make one’s way to Heaven, but one’s capacity to argue the case to others and to persuade is limited without intellectual conversion, whereby we become as familiar with the intellect and its knowing, as we are with the eye and its seeing.

We have seen that one mistake is to imagine that all knowing is a matter of animal extroversion (naïve realism) or that the life of the mind does not attain knowledge of reality (idealism). Critical realism notes that as well as understanding there is judgement of what we have understood. Understandings may be imaginary, or the best scientific theory so far; they may have a degree of certainty. Certain sorts of judgements may be infallible. So one may judge infallibly that this particular experience is one’s present experience. The intelligibility grasped in phantasm, is infallible. The sensus fidelium is infallible and a papal judgement under certain conditions is infallible. It is worth noticing I think, that many judgements we make with certainty have a degree of fallibility about them. So I have enough petrol to get home ..… but I did not know about this traffic jam.

For Lonergan the foundational principle for theology or metaphysics is not an abstract statement, but a concrete person, one who is converted religiously, morally and intellectually. Such conversion has ever to struggle with personal backsliding.

Differentiations and Conversions

2010-05-04T14:26:00.000-07:00

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.

Conversions Needed; Differentiations optional

2010-05-04T14:24:00.000-07:00

As we grow from the immediate world of infancy into the world mediated by meaning, we either find that world centrally charged by religion or not. The call is to conversion; it is not to be a theologian. It is to love the Lord our God with all our mind, our heart, our strength and our neighbour as ourselves. In other religions the demand may be differently put, but the result may be much the same. The Far East has a deep sense of prayer and spirituality, but the Zen Buddhist might describe God as “nothing”. What may be meant by this is that He is not something you can see, like a rabbit or an apple. For quite a few in the West though, the world of meaning might include scientific heroes, military heroes; and a set of theories to be mastered, physical, chemical, biological, psychological, sociological, economic; and a set of histories to be mastered; and perhaps a set of religions which once were thought important and which now are out of date.

The operative world around us is technological, and medicine is a sort of technology of the body and perhaps psychology a sort of technology of consciousness. Parents want their children to get on and get paid and so they conspire with the theoretical world represented incipiently by schools and more thoroughly by universities. The children accept the guidance of their parents and the parents are surprised to find that the children have lost their faith. At the same time we need modern technology to sustain our six thousand million people, and without people who are trained and understand this and that the system will break down.

I don’t think that mastering a technology with its theoretical component constitutes a differentiation which allows one to earn a living. Still it is a great achievement which enables one to keep systems going and be a good mechanic or doctor or whatever. The effort involved may cause one to forget about the call to conversion. I recall a mother who was much worried that her children were not working for their exams. She had not expressed any anxiety that they were not coming to church, even though she was.

What I am claiming though is that our scientifically and technologically differentiated culture places a very great demand and challenge upon young people so that it may seem to them the only thing that matters, so that they do not heed the call to love the Lord their God with all their heart.

The call to love God involves a call to love what He has created and so alongside religious conversion one may recognise a distinct moral conversion. We find precepts in religious tradition which are quite different from those normally abroad, for example, “do good to those who hate you”. The importance of human life is central here, but the surrounding ecology which supports human life is radically involved. If one poisons a lake to get rid of waste and humans thereby perish, this is a sort of murder. Human death is not directly intended but it is directly caused. I recall some chaps in Slough whose job it was to get id of several pounds of mercury. They did so by putting it into the Thames. They did their job but wondered at what mammoth destruction they had caused. Moral conversion was perhaps operative in their intellect - they understood – but not in their conduct.

The maxims of diplomacy may be quite different: “If you want peace, prepare for war”. At the same time history does indicate that withdrawing defences can be a signal of weakness to the enemy as witnessed by the decline of the Roman Empire, or the invasion of the Falkland Islands by the Argentineans.

Moral conversion involves a shift from egotism with the pleasure/pain rule of conduct to a question what is worthwhile, what is the good within our reach? Historically there can be moral progress or moral decline.

I would see Jeremy Bentham’s “Utilitarianism” as combining a point of moral progress with a principle of decline. The point of progress is that it cares for all: “The greatest good of the greatest number”. Each one counts as one. The more impoverished they are the greater the benefit, the greater the marginal utility. If the State is seen as the promoter of maximum utility, the rich must be impoverished till they are at the level of the poor unless a trickle down theory shows that the welfare of the rich overflows and trickles down to the poor. There is here a form of State absolution, I think. One recalls Lord Acton’s remark, “All power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

For Benthamism though there seem no absolute beyond pleasure. “Pushpin is as good as poetry, if it please as much”. We find here a ground of the moral relationism where it is perfectly acceptable for say, Members of Parliament to live with partners rather than spouses. Who is to judge? The economist, Alfred Marshall, by contrast sees family life as the main motive a man has to work, and in his time that work was often very unpleasant, down the mines for example. With Marshall’s view you get a sense of a particular good, the family, inspiring people to work for a wider good in return for an income, a sort of “trickle up” theory. On the basis of Marshall I found myself writing to Blair when he was PM arguing that policies which undermined the family would lead to greater poverty in the future.

Religious conversion typically expresses itself in practicing one’s religion. Moral conversion one might argue typically shows itself in the achievement of family life. Lonergan though, has a third conversion which typically grows from religious conversion and moral conversion, namely intellectual conversion.

As a matter of practice, intellectual conversion is a matter of realising that one can know things without seeing them. The very fact of worshipping an invisible God means something can be real and can matter without being seen. The very fact of being faithful to one’s spouse means recognising a value which cannot be seen. That one can talk about such matters shows that de facto one is using one’s intellect. In baptism but also the last rites, the Church does not ask do you love God, but do you believe? Are you using your mind so that you are living – and dying – in the world as it really is? Is your hope an illusion or is it founded on something real?

Fr Robert Doran SJ adds to the need for religious, moral and intellectual conversion the need for psychic conversion. I associate this with Lonergan’s “dramatic bias” which censors out needed images and feelings and perhaps censors in, or obsesses one with, unhelpful images and feelings. Since one’s understanding needs images such censorship can impede one’s understanding. An example of things being “censored out” would be racialism where one does not think people of a certain background are really human. An example of inappropriate “censoring in” would be a sexual imagery completely inappropriate and unhelpful to one’s actual sexual development.

The purpose of this paper is to say that everyone needs conversion, religious, moral, intellectual and psychic. Such conversion is ongoing and never complete in this life. By such conversion one becomes holy, good, truthful and open in an increasing measure, with a growing intensity and so becomes faultless and worthy to pass through the pearly gates.

Quite distinct are the differentiations of consciousness whereby one becomes a theologian, a scientist, an historian, an artist or a philosopher. Such expertises are in development and the community can and should develop from such advances. One can insist – according to the situation and culture – that everyone should know a bit about their religion, for example, for Christmas that they should know about Christmas, Easter, the Trinity, the Sacraments, but one cannot insist that they should all become theologians. There are different sorts of theologians and they are trained up in Research or Communications or – well there are six other specialisations. Admirable as it maybe, one is not a theologian by getting up on one’s hind legs and talking about God. Similarly, one is not obliged to be a scholar and learn Hebrew and become expert in Isaiah to be saved, but such scholars may help the preacher to convince the multitude. Again, one does not have to be a scientist to be a mechanic and mend the car, or to understand that modern science and technology are vital for modern man. Science is to do with the methodology which makes the unknown known. Again, one does not have to be an artist to be moved by a religious work of art, or to take part in a beautiful liturgy. One does not have to be a philosopher to realise that in one’s commonsense world, probably much preoccupied with making a living, one learns from scholars, one benefits from scientists, one is inspired by artists and one can learn from philosophers how the whole world in which we live can be comprehended as a unity in development.

But this positive passivity vis a vis the experts, whereby we allow them to inform us, delight us, stir us, does not mean we do not face our personal task which belongs to no one else of religious conversion whereby we love the Lord our God, moral conversion whereby we creatively and intelligently seek the limited good that is in our power, of intellectual conversion whereby what we have understood is in our lips and psychic conversion whereby we can recognise what is …….. going forward and so be new wineskins for new wine.

Human Cognition and Experience (Erlebneis)

2010-05-04T14:22:00.000-07:00

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.

History as a Science

2010-05-04T14:20:00.000-07:00

As a memory is to a person, so history is to a people, but before the Greek discovery of mind and so critical control of meaning, history was an admixture of myth and fact relating the people to the Gods or God, to nature, to other peoples. Origins shape potentiality so the myth that Chinese people have that they are descended from maggots needs to be thoroughly dispelled before they can care for a democratic or a human rights ideal.

Plato though thought we should go gently with myths, because they contain some element of truth, and so maggots may express mortality or that the majority of people may be ruled by dictatorship. Also myths may be so important that they account for conduct, and help account for the fury of the Amazons or the Empire of the English. Pareto thought religion mythical but essential to express sentiments. Perhaps too, myth belongs to our thinking about large groups of people. In battle the enemy tend to be thought of as subhuman Huns say, or one might think all Americans subhuman and greedy, or all Middle Eastern people except the Jews as prone to oriental despotism. Sir Alex Douglas Hume when Foreign Secretary had all the countries of the world simply classified as pro or anticommunist.

It is a sort of mythical mentality that for each people history should be the history of their own country. The real story of things is more complex. If Newton was English, Galilee and Copernicus were not but they are part of the same emerging story. Naturalism is a powerful myth which can galvanise a people for independence or war.

Lonergan’s view of history is rather more abstract, or perhaps one should say concrete! He sees that there is a tendency to progress through man’s understanding, judgement, and application. The discovery of how to grow wheat or how to make bread is not confined to one tribe or one people. An insight normally is not tied to the first language in which it is expressed. The insight is pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic, even though it is normally through language and through concepts that we come to discover and share in the insights of others. There is then a progressive movement forward about history, for one discovery leads to a situation in which further discoveries can be made. Weeding I suppose was done by hand before the hoe was invented. Dating things is a matter of fact when it is possible – but it gives rise to a situation where there is an emergent probability of a further discovery. Such a history is not necessarily just about technical things – so people discovered the importance of the Sabbath for the spiritual life. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Progress then can be spiritual as well as technical. The implementation of the Sabbath might lead to such quotations as “What should we do about the children” and so reading, writing and storytelling take a leap forward. The fact that progress can be spiritual as well as technical gives God (and the demons) a chance to come in on the act. So we Christians have the idea of an epoch of Revelation, starting with Adam in one way and with Abraham in another way and culminating in the death of the last apostle who was St John and whose last recorded words were “My little children, love one another.

We find then a double dynamism of progress in history – man gets to know the natural world he lives in better and better and God Himself can come to be known and even reveal himself. Everything moves forward.

The complicating factor is sin. From the beginning man turned from God, experienced the distress of mortality, and was darkened in intellect and weakened in will. The distress of mortality is a huge factor setting a context of pessimism and scepticism. Man is deeply used to a hopeless situation. So, ensconced on the dung heap he makes the most of hopelessness, making something enjoyable or even noble from the ruination which is existence. Wit, pleasure, even absolute concern for justice, might occupy him. Voltaire and Malthus are bedfellows here, but so too I suspect, those many scientists who so support the global warming thesis that they are prepared to support measures which will support the impoverishment and the discomfort of the multitude. Air conditioning for Africa – certainly not!

I think this pessimism about human existence – I recall the title of Malraux’s book “Call No Man Happy” – is not expressed by Sartres rather brilliant “It is absurd to be born, it is absurd to live, it is absurd to die”. Sartre here is in no way in love and aware of the meaning, the non-absurdity of love, and of existence in love. The pessimism i write of draws from the pathos of doomed livingness. i recall the 1950s and ‘60s where it dawned on us rather drastically that the probability was we were to be destroyed in a nuclear war. Here was a factor in permissiveness for a long term future for man seemed pie in the sky.

The pessimistic humanist living in an absurd universe feels bound to save what he can by slowing down the exuberance and carelessness of human living. The reversal of the Resurrection places man’s meaning in a Providential and Eternal context but brings a wider and deeper sense of duty.

For Lonergan, the drive forward in history of attention, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility improving situations meets the fault in man from the Fall – his darkness of intellect, his weakness of will – in the four biases, dramatic, egoistic, group and general. A bias is not a total blindness, just a blindness to some aspect of things which may be relatively unimportant or extremely serious. So Caiaphas has it that one man should die for the people but is blind to the importance of this man or any man. He is blind to the sort of people you make if you do not defend each man. His blindness gives him more energy about the things he does see.

Let us run through the biases. Dramatic bias censors in and censors out certain sorts of images, feelings, insights. Egoistic bias prevents my share of the washing up. Group bias collaborates with one group but ignores or oppresses another. It sets up a cyclical motion whereby the oppressed get their chance. General bias ignores and disparages established values in order to solve practical problems – so the monasteries get dissolved and the army gets equipped.

History then is the scene of genuine progress where a people with their leaders act authentically and reading the situation carefully, deal with emerging problems constructively. It is the scene of decline and chaos, resentment and anger where issues are not faced squarely. Retributive justice adds to the spiral of violence. So the situation gives scope for healing, redemptive love which dissolves the frontiers, for hope which overrides determinisms and for faith which breaks down the arguments ideology has constructed. Love reveals values and shows what could be done and makes man capable of great efforts and even self sacrifice. Progress, decline and redemption from decline provide different areas of history.

Lonergan also writes of different plateaus of history, the practical giving rise to cities, the theoretical giving rise to science, history, art, and religion, and a third plateau in which through self-appropriation man becomes aware of the ways forward emerging from his or her own self. A first plateau situation can be taken forward by people from the second plateau. Second plateau people can be taken forward towards personal self appropriation and creative living – “we are God’s work of art” – by third plateau minds who realise that choice belongs to man in his freedom, overriding values express what he cares for and that divine love works to bring a new order on the face of the earth.
Choice belongs to man in a radical way for what he comes to know is not just a matter of scientific handing down but a matter of personal discovery. We might in post war Britain imagine that economic growth is the only sort of progress that matters, especially today (2009) when we face recession and slump, but progress in fact, undergirded by the economy as a matter of personal formation, personal maturity, personal output, a question of loving deeds as well as material output.

Growth today has got to face and appropriate anew the achievement of self appropriation, with a recognition of differentiations of consciousness in science, history, religion and art. It has to address decline in the practical plateau so that the economy is productive and frees itself from debt. It can prevent the theoretical plateau from being the mere mastery of past discoveries. It can open the third plateau against “blocks” – the insistence that all meaning can be expressed in ordinary language; the insistence that man’s only knowledge is through empirical science; the insistence that sociology and history should be “value free”; the insistence by humanists that while there may be the self transcendence of knowledge and human love, divine love is an illusion.

All development involves the purification of tradition by an appropriate revision. The appropriate revision may restore concern for what is good in the tradition. So there has been, in warfare, a development from wholesale slaughter to respect for innocent human life. Through, I think, the Red Cross, there was the abandonment of dum-dum bullets in the First War. There emerges a concern for humanity even in the heat of battle. I suspect chivalry anticipated this concern. Respect for the sanctity of innocent human life in war but also respect for combatant life both need to be restored. Here is a point where present culture is engaged at once in pragmatic decline but also elements in development.

History and Tradition

2010-05-04T14:19:00.000-07:00

Tradition is man’s making of man. It is totally engaging and forming from our earliest years even if we reject some part of it. The Church sees tradition and scripture as together forming the source whence flows the Word of God into our hearts. When it comes to history a method is involved in checking some truth or developing an understanding of some event. When it comes to tradition we are dealing with what has already shaped us and so to dismiss some part of tradition is to dismiss some part of ourselves. It is only something one would do with a very good reason – but the Cross which we take up as Christians means dismissing parts of our tradition shaped as it may be by human folly. So an imperialist must give up certain ideas to live in a more fraternal world or someone brought up with uncles replacing uncles has got to reshape his or her life if the sacramental bond of marriage is to reshape their life. Surely it is a great thing if, over a lifetime, a person recognises a fault in their tradition and manages to reverse it.

What is transmitted by tradition is not just a way of life but a set of meanings and values that inform a way of life. The Enlightenment, excited by scientific discoveries, especially Newton’s Mechanics and revolted by religious wars and persecutions, though that reason alone was sufficient to replace tradition. Without realising it the Enlightenment was echoing the dismissal of tradition by the ‘Sola Scriptura’ of the Protestant Reformation, which dismissed the tradition of the Church when it came to Revelation. For some strange reason, for which I suppose we should be grateful, the Protestant movement for the most part did not dismiss the Councils of the Church in the first millennium. Luther though dismissed St James’ epistle as an epistle of straw because of its doctrine on works and the Protestant world felt able to dismiss the Apocrypha, various texts, not strictly in the ancient ‘Law and Prophets’, which the Church found useful for teaching and recognised as ‘inspired’, and so part of the Bible. To someone in this tradition, I suppose the question might arise: is St John’s Gospel inspired? On the positive side it is worth noting that a strict Baptist, who would hold that most of the Bishops at Nicaea were not Christian since they were baptized in infancy, nevertheless holds the doctrine of Nicaea as true. Maybe they would hold that the divine nature of Christ is obvious from Scripture anyway, so it is not because of Nicaea that they hold the Nicene doctrine.

By disregarding tradition, the Protestant world got rid of the need for a Church, and yet has endlessly to define things to give a meaning to the term. By disregarding tradition the Enlightened world has got rid of community except in the enlightened groups who would define what community is and according to their power impose with sanctions and promote with rewards what community is. So community is – the communist vanguard and those who are with them, the Nazi leadership ditto, the capitalist world with those who have sold their soul to the mighty dollar, the permissive world (with the one exception of child abuse) which regards itself as making ‘a civilised society’ (Roy Jenkins). Bend a little here and child abuse will become part of the growing up of every little one into ‘civilised society’. Or, community is – the construction of State Benefits and the only requirement is to fill in countless forms correctly. The world of reason alone proves itself to be the world of reason without a major promise and so it is a world of conflicting world views in which Truth appears to be a matter of power.

Actually, the task of the theologian is not to disparage reason which with corresponding affection is the greatest natural gift of God to man. When I write in with natural affection I am drawing on St Augustine’s work on the Trinity. Man is made in the image of the Trinity. When he understands something true he expresses it. When he expresses it, he loves it. Truth then is not for any subject a mere series of punctilio expressions of what is, like a telephone directory, but it is such that when it is expressed, it cannot but be loved. So someone making up the telephone directory, collecting data from this source and that, and typing in the correct number against the correct name will have a certain satisfaction which is a proportionate emotional experience, a proportionate love. In a day’s work done to perfection, the fact of limitation belonging to the task may be overcome by a great satisfaction. So in the Trinity the eternal expression of the Word, expressing all that the Father is, even unto personhood, grounds the eternal expression of the Spirit, of love, of personhood, who proceeds from the Father and Son.

Man working is not man consuming but man constructing and in constructing an object he constructs his own self. His love grows not just for what he has made but for his own self as maker. In this way work is an erlebneis, an experience which somehow not only gives identity as appreciated but opens to the infinite.

Last week, I suggested that erlebneis might be not just individual – an individual unit of meaning – but also collective – I instanced the Second World War – so that meaning is expressed and satisfaction is experienced by a multitude. If insights coalesce in an individual they can be shared by the group. There is a contagion too of feeling. There is a development of identity. So one gets an historical event, erlebneis, which is communicable to the next generation.

If one can identify such an erlebneis, such an event, one has perhaps a carrying wave of meaning moving into the future, and it is on such a wave that the gospel too, a distinct erlebneis, can be carried.

There is a task here for while a secular event may engage the extreme of love and self sacrifice it is also mixed with frailty and fault. So Evelyn Waugh’s Trilogy on the Second World War finds faith as a thread mingling with absurdity and infidelity.

The genuine values of the carrying wave therefore need to be discerned from so much else, but in that discernment, the values become values not just for one people but for all mankind. Maybe the notion of human rights is a sort of varying wave emerging from the Second World War, but it needs enriching to include the unborn and the frail and it needs broadening to include duties. So by its consistency, by its comprehension and by its sacrifice around this notion the Church bears witness to divine truth but also to a natural truth.

The erlebneis which gives a collective identity may be sad of course – so the Irish Potato Famine or the persecution of Catholics in these islands, but I think with the endurance of trials, there is always a positive side to be found. Those who simply raise the sword and triumph have I think, a problem, for the message can hardly be universalised

I think the notion of a collective erlebneis is part of the Second Enlightenment which is reversing the positions of the eighteenth century Enlightenment for it restores the idea of tradition and helps us understand how we have all been shaped in ways beyond counting and analysis by the history of our people, by the histories of our peoples. I recall an American saying that an undoubtedly good thing in history was the American Declaration of Independence. I did point out it looked different from the English perspective! The carrying wave emergent has to satisfy both sides. Maybe here the carrying wave is the doctrine of subsidiarity. Those in authority should not be too heavy handed. A part of what philosophy can do is to translate a particular good which has been experienced at a particular time by this people or that into a more general proposition acceptable to all people of good will. It belongs to the Church to insist on the goodness and power of reason. She does not generate the contemporary ‘carrying wave’: that emerges from history: she can though promote what is good and point out and condemn what is evil. Rather as a surf boarder used the waves, she may use the carrying wave to express yet higher truths. So the rights of man point to the rights of God and so to sin and righteousness.

Differentiations and Conversion

2010-05-04T14:18:00.000-07:00

Philosophy

2010-05-04T14:17:00.000-07:00

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.

Wisdom and Practicality

2010-05-04T14:16:00.000-07:00

There are two sides of the brain, one intuitive, practical, feminine, and one argumentative, rational, and obviously wise. In fact from the beginning of philosophy it was realised that you could be a learned fool and that alongside wisdom there was right conduct. For the Greeks the difference was between sophia and phronesis; for the Romans it was sapientia and prudential; and for Aquinas a person had to get natural and supernatural prudential into some sort of kilter. Perhaps Luther’s focus on faith, not works, echoes the matter.

Lonergan thinks that, under scholastic influence, which analysed human being under sense experience, intellect and will, the focus has been on sophia, on intellect, for one cannot will what one does not know. The assumption has been that knowledge is free of bias since it is concerned with truth. Modern writers though see that what we choose to know is not unrelated to our interest. If one is a scripture scholar in the UK, one’s career would probably be ruined if one held that Matthew not Mark wrote the first Gospel. As a fish one is expected to swim with the shoal and as an academic too.

Lonergan though sees the will as shaping up intellectual concerns for he goes in for what he calls intentionality analysis and finds that man is most stirred by what he loves. So the love of God might arouse an interest in theology to explain the matter; the love of a wife might lead to carcerism and an interest in passing certain exams and the love of a people or mankind might be stirred more by eloquence and vague examples rather than a scholarly attention to a detailed argument. The fact of love at the level of the will or the fourth intentional level gives high matter for reflection and further decision. Love can invade one’s being beyond reason, whereas with faculty analysis love is an emanation from intellect. One moves from a position where nothing can be loved unless it is known, to a position where nothing is truly known unless it is loved.

Intentionality analysis though comes upon an interesting point when it notes that with historical studies or social studies, ‘the reconstruction of the constructions of the human spirit’, the point of judgement is primarily subconscious, not conscious. So if you ask a non Catholic the meaning of “You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church”, you will find a minimalistic interpretation, but if you ask a Catholic, the text will be related forward to show the importance of the Holy See. We have different mindsets, horizons, blics and our mindset shapes the way we think.

This is in contrast with doing a calculation or a scientific experiment. Everything here is consciously formulated and verified. Historians turn to an understanding which is held in memory and which is not brought forth as part of the evidence. A historian who does not believe in God will always deny a miracle and finds that sincere people can be self deceived.

The psyche then is not just the source of images and feelings helpful to consciousness for the solving of a problem. It is the source of memories and judgements which exercise a control over what can be thought. Conversion is a change in the mindset operating at a subconscious as well as a conscious level. Fr Doran holds that realising the importance of the psyche involves a further sort of conversion. Memory is another world for the psyche and the realisation comes that forgetting is part of the health of memory as well as remembering, as Neitsche pointed out. Memory becomes something to be cared for and more deliberately constructed. One comes to recognise materials which are helpful for one’s emotional and imaginative development. One sees the disordered development where fascination develops around what is perverse and evil. With all developments, including perverse ones, we find others are involved, encouraging what is good but also encouraging what is evil.

Our Lord, in the parable of the Sower, sees the ground which is well cultivated as yielding fruit one hundred fold. Our speech reflects the heart, a more familiar word than the psyche. Yielding fruit means teaching others, so any tradition is passed on from age to age. A person making an effort needs training, education, encouragement and support. The key to passing on the faith is to have taken it to heart oneself but I suspect that teaching the faith is much like teaching the piano. It does not just happen.

Where there is a great experience (erlebris) then the passing on of the matter is more a matter of oratory than of technical discourse, and the oratory may be more a matter of telling a tale than of standing on a platform and rallying the crowd. I have learned about El Alamein from a man who shot two soldiers and when he examined them saw they were just boys. The technical matters of strategies, exact locations, exact dates are not the heart of the matter as it passes on from generation to generation.

It is not only language but also conduct that gets passed on this way. A people has its traditions which are dear to it. For an Englishman, Crown and Parliament are part of the set up, but for most Frenchmen the Revolution and Napoleon have shaped up a more modern identity. So the committed Anglican or committed Catholic have been shaped up in a thousand ways by their people. The precise origin of the difference with its technical positions will be unknown to most and perhaps still a matter of learned dispute. Heart speaks to heart in the roar of waters.

There was a ‘modern man’, a nineteenth century historian, who was described as modern because the tradition of his forebears had ceased to be his home and had become his historical object. But one’s historical object is a single event, whereas one’s shaping by one’s spiritual home is a multiple series of events. If to realise this is part of what it means to be a post-modern man, then here is an advance on sheer modernity. There is something similar for the natural science. Every time we breathe or eat or see the sunrise, we are virtually connected with the world of nature. To imagine that the whole world of nature has become one’s scientific object is an impoverishment and an error. There are technical questions in theology, some of which might require learning Hebrew to answer. One does not therefore cease to celebrate Christmas and Easter till the point is clear. There are problems in economics. If one can keep it going one does not give up one’s job till the question is answered.

Lonergan sees our culture at any moment as historically shaped by a cooperation and development (or decline) going on across the generations and by the cooperation going on today between individuals and families, economic enterprises and government bodies. Different cultures have different histories and different conventions to be followed. There is a substructure if commonsense which keeps everything operating in a variegated way, so schools teach and medical centres dispense potions and law courts dispense justice and legislative assemblies make laws. This realm, though it makes use of expertise, though it respects expertise, has as its object the common good. I think we can identify this area with Lord Shaftesbury’s ‘common sense’ – a sense for the common good – and with the French, ‘Le Bon sens’. But to culture there is a super structural area which is in development in highly specialised ways, scientific, historical, philosophical, artistic, religious – or of course, these worlds of expertise can be in decline. So the Pharisees were highly religious but their teaching on the Sabbath was too strict for human flesh and blood and denounced by the Messiah.

Lord Acton pointed out the danger of power which belongs to the common sense realm – “All power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”, but the super-structural areas witness to the arrogance of the experts, and I do not have Lord Action’s pen to express the matter succinctly. From way back, whence I know not, “a little learning is a dangerous thing”. But what of the President of the Royal College of Science declaring that global warming is a fact”! It seems that our secular society has found a new Pope! I find in myself when asked to bow and bend the knee before some secular authority that I am more stiff jointed than perhaps I should be. Perhaps working on Lord Action’s dictum one could say “All expert knowledge tends to arrogance. Absolute certainty leads to dictatorship”.

Ever since I first heard it, I have thought Lord Acton’s dictum wrong at a metaphysical level because God is all powerful but corruption in no way belongs to Him. Similarly, all God’s knowledge is utterly certain, but as Lord Action discerned history, under God’s Providence, as a case of “He puts forth His arm in strength and raises the lowly”. In raising the lowly He gives us certitude but it is a lowly affair in terms of temporal power. In fact a great certitude we have, is that it would be a great thing to overcome our own wayward inclinations arising from the psyche, from ‘the heart’.

Locating Metaphysics

2010-05-04T14:14:00.000-07:00

Hans-George Gadamer, in his “Word and Method” (1960) uses the word “hermeneutic” to cover the whole of our existence and how we interpret it. He sees being, what is, what has happened, as belonging to this “hermeneutic universe” and sees here, even in an age of method and empirical science, of conclusions which may be coercive but which are also revisable, the recovery of metaphysics and the beginning of the end of the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns.

In the West, we associate metaphysics with Aristotle and perhaps too, with the Church. Aristotle’s scientific world of cause and effect has given way to the empirical scientific world with Riemannian Bendy Space, with Heisenberg’s uncertainty and with probability theory. With Sir Karl Popper we discover that any scientific statement must be revisable. We find ourselves in a universe which moves forward with the expectation of new discoveries and the reversal of old positions – which may have to wait until the old professors depart the scene. Cause and effect have become mathematical correlation without causality and without explanation. If Aristotle’s “causation” has departed the scene, the Church, which still, like the world of commonsense, speaks of cause and effect, has not expressed her philosophical position to the modern world. She awaits perhaps a new Thomas Aquinas and since the Second Vatican Council (1962 - 5) realises that there is a huge task to be done to relate Revelation to modern culture in a mutually beneficial way. As commonsense knows about causation from billiards, so the Church knows about it from creation out of nothing.

Gadamer sees a science based culture as tending to shallowness but takes heart from the fact that accounts of scientific methods are missing something which is essential to them. In Germany, in the nineteenth century historical studies “took off”, to use Rostow’s phrase, and were aware of themselves as the heirs of Renaissance humanism and doing something quite equivalent to what was going on in the realm of natural science. They were though, quite unable to account for what they were doing. If the natural sciences fall short in explaining what they do, then the same was true of the historical science as it began to emerge confidently. Indeed the historical sciences thought at first that they must be, like the natural sciences, using a form of induction. Their task though was not to conclude to what always happens but to account for the particular.

Gadamer is strong on concepts which emerge and shape man, so that something happens which shapes us over and above what we might choose. Such a concept in nineteenth century Germany, was Bildung. In medieval times man was seen as made in the image of God. Bildung expresses that man has something to make of himself, so in the nineteenth century, Herder expressed Bildung as being made in the image of humanity. On the one hand one sees here how the Modernist crisis arose but also we can contrast Bildung with the English ideas of “the gentleman”. Bildung was a classless ideal for all. The scholar was held by it as a personal ideal but also it describes what should go on in all.

Another such forming concept is Erlebris experience. Time is not something going forward with pendulums or atomic clocks as it is experienced – our experience of time is around an event which shapes us and is memorable. So the Second World War was such an event and indeed a shared one, shared differently by different peoples. So as well as personal experience, there is the tradition and self expression of different peoples as Droyson pointed out. This is where the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns breaks down for we are all formed by such experiences.

Helmholtz and others tried to explain their historical work referring to “tact”, but quite what they meant is unclear. It is something to do with the way memory is shaped and not just by the inductive method. It is perhaps helpful to note that there can be insights into data without conceptualisation and express formulation and this would allow much more data to be covered. Perhaps this expressed insight accounts explicitly for at least part of what was meant by “tact”. Tact thus is being in touch with realms of data which may be relevant to some new understanding. Wide reading does not as such give wisdom even though one of the historian’s slogans was “understanding through research”. There is a sort of liveliness of mind which recognises the emergence of a new idea.

For example, St Birinus crowned Cynegils, a soldier, in about 640 and though the West Saxon monarchy which emerged was for a while subject to others, it eventually, by adding Mercia and Northumberland, made England the oldest integral nation in the world today. Was there something in the Chrism alone making a king – as opposed to blessing one who already was kingly – which accounts for the energy of the new monarchy? Or does location explain the matter? There is a flux of ideas and in time maybe a judgement to be made.
When it comes to judgements being made, Gadamer is very much under the continuing influence of Kant. If the theory one has is an priori construct how can it tell one about the a posterior? So Gadamer sees all conceptualisation as lacking being referring back to the hermeneutical experience where being is to be found. But how is being to be found in the hermeneutical experience if it is not to be found in some way in conscious experience? The tabula rasa is no doubt full of orientations but the development which goes on must be some combination of experiences and memory. If being is to be found in the hermeneutic world then it must somehow be found in the world of experience, for the hermeneutic world is built up by a succession of experiences.

The mistake is to think of being as the concrete other in the duality of experience, subject, and object. The being which is directly apprehended includes evidence about the subject as well as about the object. I see an ashtray. The way forward is not to focus on the ashtray but to focus on the ashtray and its observation. So with Galileo the thing is to focus not just on the moon and its craters but Galileo and his interpretation. With Newton we have one who has a certain mechanical formulation but is it certain? How does one ground certainty? What is certain is not the theory as such but that a theory is being formulated which is thought to be certain. Where we have certainty in a genuine way there we have “being” and so material for metaphysical science or more importantly, material for our hermeneutical take on existence. Hermeneutical of being, knowledge of being, thus arises from judgements of truth. These may be made by others who teach us explicitly, but they may be communicated by true insights which do not bother to get themselves formulated and affirmed. If this shorthand in de facto communication of being is inconvenient to philosophers, it is convenient to the human race. Philosophers can help the rest of us to recognise what is sheer mythology in our apprehension for example the apprehension of the future by tea leaves in the tea cap. It is an everlasting task to discriminate between what is thought to be and what in fact is so.

Kantian thought is caught between the a priori with its clear conclusions and the concrete in which man lives. Judgement cannot reach the concrete save by an infinite series of judgements which is an impossibility. So “taste” is brought in and it is good taste that must ensure good concrete judgements, whether personal or social.

Here Kantian thought has abandoned Anglo Saxon enlightened thought. Lord Shaftesbury, following the Romans, had discoursed upon “commonsense”, which appears to have been more than a sense of what is common, but a sense commonly shared by those who have to do with the common. In France the same sense was recognised as “le bon sense”. In Germany though such a sense was not applicable to a set of small states, and so “commonsense” was neglected by Kant. With it the frivolous matter of feeling was omitted from the serious, precise matter of moral judgement. I recall my mother who lived through the Second World War, thinking that concentration camps would not be possible in England, “because of the way people felt”. The truth is, about a value which matters, we develop feelings so that we have energy to defend what is precious. Correlatively, the fact is that where we have strong feelings which are beyond criticism (as after a rare, good film), then values are implicit which, may not as yet, have been explicitly formulated and may never be.

It is not true then that all over values are brought to light in concrete circumstances. We hold more than we realise. But circumstances may force this or that issue to be expressed in a way recognisable by all, including historians.

Gadamer then is right to point to the hermeneutical world in which we live and acknowledge being. His fault is not to recognise that being and value can be expressly formulated by human beings especially when the situation demands such a response. The fault here though lies not so much with Gadamer as with the Kantian world in which he lives with the realisation that there is a certain shallowness to a prior empirical scientific conclusions.

Gadamer then stands in a world where “Being is dead” and various philosophies, pragmatic, existential, phenomenological and empirical reign and by turning to various forms of experience, the historical and the aesthetic. He declares being to be alive in the hermeneutical experience which shapes us largely despite ourselves as we learn a language and get more profoundly shaped by concepts as their meanings change and develop through linguistic changes and new discoveries. A child of the 1960s – his book was published in 1960 – he largely ignores religious life as a further hermeneutical source for the recognition of being. The fact that, with Descartes, philosophy attained its autonomy from religious life does not in fact mean that religion has ceased to exist and to be a huge influence for good and evil in the hermeneutic world of man. He writes “When science expands unto a total technocracy and brings on the cosmic night of the forgetfulness of being, then one may look at the last fading light … or turn around to look for the first shimmer of its return”.

Though science is wonderful, the death of being is a serious cultural weakness in our Western world for it would dismiss religion and history and confirm morality to some sort of adjunct of technocracy.

The addition needed to Gadamer’s view is the realisation that the hermeneutic experience is not to be had without conscious experience and it belongs to conscious experience to assess the case again and again and to ask “Is it so?”. When that is done, being is touched upon and sometimes affirmed. One does not have to be religious to see that Cynegil’s coronation was quite different from that of St Ethelbert if indeed St Ethelbert was crowned. Whether this difference was relevant to subsequent history is a further question. A question though is laden not just with theoretical matters but matters of fact – and so, being.

If one considers metaphysics as a matter of ontologically true propositions, causality, logical deductions which are certain then the subject becomes “moon-sick” and rather limited, but if the first principles are persons operating according to the norms of diligent attention, restless intelligence, rational judgement or posing of a theory, and consequent praxis, then one has a metaphysics which recognises the heuristic structures and the methodology of natural science, history, philosophy and theology. One comes across a world of being which always includes human being and the state of human understanding as it develops through time. Such metaphysics does not, as Aristotle’s did, obstruct natural science, but would allow different disciplines to recognise their common ground.

By recognising that the first principles for a modern metaphysics are persons acting in the concrete, normatively authentically, responsibly – and indeed lovingly – we find that metaphysics is a personal challenge to overcome any sort of bias.

By bringing in the human dimension in any empirical judgement we bring in a dimension which is absolutely affirmable. Thus being is affirmed whilst not in any way restricting the onward flow of scientific discoveries or historical development. With Gadamer the metaphysical is somehow present in what we know. I think, bringing in the subject and the object, the metaphysical element is present as we puzzle and as we bring in the best theory to date. It is present when we rush to judgement and declare certainty prematurely, as with Laplace, Malthus or maybe a multitude of experts today discoursing upon CO2 and ice caps melting. Metaphysics does not vanish because truth is rashly and erroneously proclaimed.

Metaphysics which, perhaps with the help of historical science, bases itself on the human subject as well as the object of his thought and care, is not thrown by the fact that theories are hypothetical and in development or by the fact that thinkers are not always aware of the conditions which need to be fulfilled if a judgement is to be sound, truth and so being attained.

Being and Shallowness

2010-05-04T14:13:00.000-07:00

There is the sense of his or her own being that a person may have and there is the being of everything else; minerals, plants, animals, men, angels, and God.

Our sense of being is very much tied up with our knowledge of being. Much knowledge is at the maybe level. So one might say the level of exports is related to 1) the size of the economy related to the world economy 2) the exchange rate and 3) the presence of nationals in other countries. When I was dealing with such maybes, I came across some ideas which were at once widely neglected but of supreme importance. One was man’s dignity and often his need. Another was the existence of God. Others concerned the Church and morality. What I did not notice was that instead of making hypothetical theories, I was able to make a truth judgement, a judgement about the being of things.

Hypothetical judgements might get one good marks. Truth judgements give one the world one lives in, so that one is, one is not just experiencing one’s own being, but living in a world one has, in some measure, come to know.

The capacity to affirm “it is so”, “it may be so”, “it is not so”, is strangely absent to our modern culture, for indeed, the whole scientific superstructure rests on the best theory at the moment. Lonergan points out that while scientific theories may be revisable, scientific method is not. Of course, the instruments may change and so the details of a method may change, but there is ever the matter of attending to the evidence, of producing theories, of testing them by experiment, and so of revising theories and improving technologies.

One comes to be certain then about the general pattern of the human way of working. As a young man I would have thought this is something really important. Now, I would say this is the truth and so it has the importance in the scheme of things that it has.

Returning to the idea of certain ideas being really important, I think I was witnessing to the fact that we cannot reach a truth judgement without being profoundly stirred thereby. In the 1960s human dignity was such that before man went into space programmes, he should see that every hungry child was fed. I cannot really now disagree with the idealistic youth that I was. Truth judgements are inescapably involved with feelings and so, values. One recalls the statement that “feelings are the mass and momentum of our living” and that values are apprehended in feelings.

Values are connected with conduct and conduct takes us into the realm of the not totally comprehended concrete. Alongside Sophia, there is phronesisis, alongside sapientia there is prudentia, and I think in English, we all know that the very clever person can be a blithering idiot when it comes to conduct.

The fact that one feels strongly about a conclusion does not mean that one should feel strongly in the process of reaching a conclusion. Here is the original place for detachment – is it so, is it not? It does not depend on me! It is a matter of evidence. So I care deeply whether or not I am in the red with the bank – but I look at the entries to see if they are correct. I care deeply whether the world is heading to global warming – so I concern myself to look at the evidence as it is. The detachment required for clear judgement may not always obtain. In 1917, Einstein’s theory about light bending was verified by observers who were already convinced and apparently the cloud cover was such that nothing could be verified.

For Lonergan judgement it is that takes one into the realm of being. “It is” means that what is proposed is part of that realm. For the world tinged with idealism judgement is just a further theoretical component whereby upon correct promises a correct conclusion is reached. Judgement therefore does not reach the “It is”. For Gadamer I suspect the whole theoretical world is thus tinged with idealism, but for him I think the hermeneutic world, the world known but not conceptualised, is where being is to be found. I think he would say that we know being in our hearts but once we express things we get into the shallowness of concepts. Lonergan would agree we know being in our hearts but has the critical realistic position that we use concepts and words to sometimes know something more of what is. This then enters the mind in a subconscious way to be brought forth by memory at the appropriate time. So the good historian has a multitude of true judgements hidden away but can bring forth a helpful example when in discussion, say.

Phronesis, praxis, prudentia, common sense, le bon sense is a matter not just of words expressing what is true, but of actions and commitments which are appropriate and often shared. The energy associated with a truth judgement comes to promote and help the word of praxis. So in matters religious there can be a first fervour which helps a person say to make a religious commitment, to join an order say.

Of course, one can grow accustomed to everything and then suffer a sort of boredom or acidic which is dangerous for religious life whether in the parish or a religious house. In a parish there are those who just fail to turn up. In a religions house a manifest boredom can be dangerous in another way.

The problem is that there is a failure of developing understanding to provide developing interest and energy. The remedy then is enlightenment or further understanding. If one conceives understanding as just a matter of conception and logic then it, too, will appear boring, so it is really important to grasp that knowledge following the question “Is it?” extends one’s own self with its energy and responsibility.

My grandfather used occasionally to complain of “brain fag” and take off to the Lake District leaving his physics lab for a week or two. I would say this was a need for recuperation, for the whole psyche to find a broader balance. But it must happen in secular studies where the understanding is a conceptualism, an idealism that the process of discovery becomes tedious. So you come across the strange phenomenon of a scientist just giving up what should be his greatest concern and delight. He has not realised that he is dealing with the real.

One finds in the Church some people with an antipathy to philosophy or dogma. They have a devotional life based on Scripture and Liturgy. They find themselves threatened by the “Is it so, is it not so?” level of thought or by the question, “Is there a better way of understanding all this?” It is worth noticing that the word “Amen” means “it is so”. Helpful too, is St Augustine and St Anselm’s approach of “faith seeking understanding”. Cardinal Newman’s phrase “the development of dogma” has about it the idea of a developing understanding as does Vatican One. One can see the dogmas of the Church as answers to questions which have arisen by the Church in the spirit of faith. “This is our belief!” Hence the anathema sit – let them be dismissed – for those who do not accept.

Kant’s Copernican turn to the subject was too poor an affair, for it did not appreciate the importance of saying “it is so”. The subsequent culture, phenomenological, existential, pragmatic, does not deal with existence unless one regards Lonergan as a phenomenologist of consciousness, setting off with the question “What do I do when I know?”.

“What do I do when I know?”, is phenomenological and descriptive of states, of processes and of feelings which stir us on. The curiosity of sense leads to a new state where wonder works on phantasm, to form a schematic image whence flows conception and description; a new state emerges with the question, “Is it so?”; and a further state with “What should I do about it?”.

Perhaps activities is a more familiar word for us – so a state (sensing), gives rise to an activity (wondering), gives rise to a new state (working with phantasm), and a new activity (finding answers). One state and activity gives rise to another under an emotional impulse which drives us on.

Values and Feelings

2010-05-04T14:12:00.000-07:00

On a traditional view wisdom, dealing with what is certain, gives us the moral order, and prudence, dealing with the variability of contingent events, has to implement what is right, and among the contingent events would be feelings. At the same time devotion, surely a matter of feeling, was highly prized, but one should be prepared to cope with dryness – a lack of feeling. At the same time a continuous lack of feeling was seen as problematic.

Modern psychology recognises a complete lack of moral feeling as psychopathic, an illness of a sort, and so recognises a substrate of feelings as necessary to psychological health. At the same time it is recognised that feelings themselves can be disordered and Karl Rogers’ counselling method would bring about a situation where they are recognised, named, understood and appropriately dealt with.

Lonergan describes thought without feelings as Shakespeare’s “pale cast of thought” and describes feelings as the mass and momentum of our living. At the same time I think that modern life tends to occupy itself with a set of replaceable functions so that personality is largely irrelevant to function and feelings are in abeyance. In terms of mass and momentum perhaps many are half alive. Recognising the situation some may feel alienation and so set the ground for a different sort of future.

There is a development of feelings which may be crushed out or which may go too far and lead to sentimentality and the stars being God’s daisy chain. One may disparage what others already possess and so harm your own development. You may focus on personal attainment in one area so that you lose sympathy and the capacity to relate.

One may claim of feelings that they seek expression. The lover writes poems or does a tap dance. The soldier before battle tests his weapons once again. The penitent seeks absolution. The rapist awaits his chance. Those who love purely catch a glimpse of God and worship.

Lonergan claims that values are apprehended in feelings. At the basis of apprehending the world mediated by meaning and motivated by value is trust and belief. We have an empathy which sets our feelings in resonance with others. Believing others we ask why and if the others explain well we are set on a path of intelligent appropriation of values, of “things that matter”.

We are stirred too by the fine example of others, a leader or maybe a figure from the past like Lawrence of Arabia. I suspect though that the feelings that promote values also arise from within. Man is not under the immediate impulse of instinct like other animals but Oetinger the Swabian pietist thought instincts developed gradually to form an interpretative structure which he identified with Lord Shaftesbury’s “commonsense” – the sense that makes community. For Oetinger this was the sense that allowed a true interpretation of Scripture. Here we come upon a supernatural instinct which the Catholic Church recognises, “think with the Church” but equally, “feel with the Church” – “sentire cum ecclesia”.

The fact of feelings is to do with the fact of bodiliness, so at rest feelings are very basic, such as being cold, or tired or hungry, or comfortable, energetic and replete. We are made though for bodily self transcendence in family love, in love for our people (witnessed to by the soldier, but expressed in countless other ways: “love your neighbour as yourself”). Our relationship with our God in the Christian religion is also bodily, though not only bodily. So Simon Peter finds himself being directly quizzed “Do you love me?” His answer affects the heart of Christ as well as expressing his own. At the end game which lifts us to Heaven, we find our emotions totally involved in the self bestowal we call love.

Emotions then are not confined biological purpose but escort our living in its technical achievements, its social developments, its cultural developments and in its religious developments. St John of the Cross in his dark night of the soul has darkened the world around him but his heart, his emotions are totally involved with the unseen God who works within him.

Lonergan is sometimes seen as a dry as dust thinker, but actually he places the body with its neural systems at the base of all our conscious performance and our conscious performance involves the body and feeling all the way to the self surrender and discovery which is love.

Bodily neural life is organised by the psyche which as such is an unconscious organising power which shapes up what we deal with in consciousness in the way of images and feelings. As the psyche is higher than the neural system, so intentionality is higher than the psyche. As the psyche depends on the neural so intentionality depends on the psyche. In all that we do we are feeling about it. In all that we do we have imaginative equipment at work, particularly, I think one should point out, words. A damaged psyche will limit intentional performance so there is dramatic bias and dramatic conversion which might actually be rather a long and tedious affair dealing maybe with something long forgotten and deliberately forgotten. Actually as Neitsche who went mad pointed out for our sanity there are some things we should deliberately forget, I think in this sane utterance of a later madman, we gain the clue that though the psyche is unconscious and shapes our conscious potentialities as to images, words, feelings it is not immune to influence from our conscious performance. If our psyche is damaged some way, it is through our conscious performance that we might hope to heal it. It is healthy to see any conversion as a long term process, even life long, and this applies to psychic conversion too and perhaps above all.

Lonergan uses the “operators” to describe the movement from sense, to intelligence, to reasonableness, to value laden responsibility and he uses the term quasi-operators to describe the imaginative and verbal and emotional concomitance of facts which keep us interested when thinking about something, which keep us detached from making a conclusion when considering all the evidence, which give us energy and prudence when deciding and performing.

The neural system and the psyche remind us we are bodily and they, at the culmination of the process of development, show us that the goal of love is not some abstract definition but includes a bodily and emotional self donation. We have to keep coming down to the fact that psychically we are bodily and limited human beings capable of but one course of action. When it comes to love the quasi operators are often more important than the operators. This of course can be a cause of folly whether the love is divine, or familial, or for a people and mankind.

When there is a choice to be made, there is often a “wrenching” for part of our emotional love life has to die. You can only watch one programme on TV – or if you switch back and forth you miss something of each. I loved Economics but when the priesthood called, I had to get into a quite different realm of studies – I had, trusting in God, to let things go. A person is in love with two people but can only marry one – there has to be a letting go, and not quite as detached as that of St Thomas More who married the older sister because he did not want to upset her by marrying the younger. A middle aged man feels young again in the company of his secretary – he has to let the temptation die if he is to stay faithful to his wife. The fact that there are values to be upheld mean that there is wrenching to be borne. This is in large measure the meaning of the cross we have to bear if our life is to be an intelligible offering to the Lord (St Ignatius) “If you love Me, keep my commandments”.

So while values arise in feelings, genuine values also have the task of directing the emotional life in a way which is worthy. Fr Lonergan sees the Marian dogmas as helpful here. He sees the main body of dogmas as “The Church making an act of faith and so expressing her faith” when it is threatened as it was threatened by the Arian heresy in the early fourth century. He sees the Marian dogmas, the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption as guiding the devotional life of the Christian away from sin and to the hope of Heaven.

Feelings are the Mass and Momentum of our living whence may arise disvalues as well as values. The intellectual life under its own norms and with the help of faith is purified from error and moved to the truth including the truth of values. Feelings too are typically in need of purification if we are wholeheartedly to pursue the good.

Truth

2010-05-04T14:10:00.000-07:00

We are shaped up as a people by a process of socialisation, acculturation, education, as a result of which we come to know the world we live in, its nature, its significant events. Two questions arise, first, have we taken on board our tradition? Secondly, is the tradition sound?

There has been a tendency to see tradition as basically unsound. Would it not be better to be Rousseau’s noble savage; to join the Taleban in destroying Moslem carvings; to date everything from the French Revolution? The Second Enlightenment has restored tradition as a sometimes flawed but necessary shaper of man, who, born into the world, has to learn how to speak and what to value.

The first enlightenment deplored tradition and declared science and reason. But in fact science is a new sort of tradition. No chemist knows all chemistry – the world of knowledge is shared by a whole group. Initially science seemed to be a matter of genius – Copernicus, Galileo, Newton – in fact though, earlier achievements set the conditions for the latter, so there was a sort of collaboration going on across the spaces of time and distance. So in contemporary progress whether in science, history, philosophy, or theology what one needs is a creative collaboration, a method becoming conscious of itself as a method in operation. Part of our modern problem is to allow tradition to march alongside tradition rather than one tradition, say, the natural sciences, saying it is the only thing worthwhile and leading to truth.

Traditions can develop and improve under gifted human contributions or they can go into decline and meanings can be lost. So in the Catholic Church the meaning of marriage is getting lost – 50 years ago there were nearly 10 times more marriages in church. A set of meanings and values has not been passed on to the next generation.

Wittgenstein said one lesson in piano playing does not make one a pianist and one lesson in philosophy does not make one a philosopher. One class on matrimony does not shape one for the life-long sacrament. In Chios in pagan times, divorce was unknown for 700 years because as a matter of course, the older generation of women would take the younger women in hand. There was no TV and there were no advertisements. Everything was passed on by conversation – one might say the positive power of gossip. The interpersonal aspect is really important – so Lonergan writes “excellence in any walk of life is ever a matter of effort, training, education, encouragement, and support”. The more important aspects of formation depend on interpersonal encouragement and support, which I do not imagine computers or even books can give. Divine grace can give interpersonal support, of course, where the human reality has got lost.

I would like to focus a bit on the word “normative”. It is surely an element of conscience. There are norms which should be achieved or we are left dissatisfied with our own performance. So a scientist might falsify his data to achieve success or a scholar might pretend to have read a book when he has not. A doctor should examine the patient before making a diagnosis. A confessor should listen to the penitent before giving pious advice. Each profession has different sorts of things to attend to. One would not expect the priest to get out a stethoscope. But according to one’s position, not to attend to the relevant data is a personal failure.

When someone is talking about something unfamiliar you may begin to get the point but still be left half in confusion. There is a norm to be observed here. What is the connection between matter being defined as changeability and man being potens omnia? If I did get the point can I express it to myself or to another? Can I rest satisfied with a mere glimmer? When one understands a new point, there is a certain delight. To recognise when one is half way there, is normative. To recognise when one has got it, is also an achievement. To pretend though, is to fail to fulfil the norm, “be intelligent”.

Rationality, which meets the question “Is it? Is it not?”, also has norms. Is global warming taking place? Because A + B + C, I think so. Maybe I think so because I ought to think so, because the consequences of being wrong would be so terrible, Or is this a rush to judgement before the evidence is in, and so not recognising the norm be reasonable – have sufficient reason for your affirmation. Maybe my judgement about global warming is influenced by the fact that experts have been wrong in the past when it comes to practical judgements. Malthus thought if the poor were allowed to breed it would end in famine. At the end of the nineteenth century there were those who were worried about coal running out. To make a judgement one might have questions about Krakatau and other earthquakes and about sunspots and their frequency, about forests and their decimation. Pollution is a poor thing, to be avoided, global warming something of a different order.

There is then a set of norms governing conduct – avoid evil, do good. Conduct should be reasonable. The Canadian Prime Minister conducted foreign policy on the basis of tea leaves in his tea cup. This might, I suppose, be justified if his aim was to keep people guessing but on the face of it, it looks like irrational conduct.

If one has followed the precepts, be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable in a normative way then, maybe in a limited way, one knows the world as it is. Certain negative precepts belong to that world – do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not be envious. Positively the commandments of old teach us to worship God and honour our parents. Actually though we have commitments and recognise values, so we have, as it were, positive precepts which we take upon ourselves, for example, remembering one’s wife’s birthday.

Would it be correct to suggest that values are grounded in love, love which purifies, enlightens, and brings one into unity?

Man has been described as self completing so that the other becomes essential to one’s own being. One completes oneself by growth in knowledge and love. This movement sets up a path to be followed if growth is to continue. So as well as valuing one’s beloved, one has values to fulfil along the way. So a nun, holding herself in singleness for her Lord would not normally dress up and go out to nightclubs, though she might if she was looking to help fallen women.

There are values which purify, so one gets rid of what is opposed to the life of love. If one is working for the poor, the more one might simplify one’s dress.

There are values which enlighten, so one applies oneself to understand relevant things better.

There are values which unify – one finds a person’s name and remembers it, and where they come from. With regard to God one sees to it that one says one’s prayers in a reasonably diligent way. With regard to mankind one gives away 10% of one’s income maybe, if one can afford it. Perhaps one studies Economics: “If you want to help the poor, study Economics”.

There are values arising from the norms but it seems to me that personal values arise in one’s freedom and purify, foster and express the life of love which at its heart is free self bestowal. Personal values belong to a person moving to self transcendence and self completion in an authentic way, moved by love. As Aquinas said, things are matter and form but more form than matter, so one might say authentic life is a matter of norms fulfilled and values chosen, but more a matter of values chosen and lived out. The danger is present though that so demanding are values operative, whether religious, political or domestic that the norms cease to be observed and the enthusiast loses his normal human integrity and in time his cause must suffer too.

The English and Philosophy

2010-02-15T09:38:00.001-08:00

Lonergan said “Values are apprehended in feelings” and the English are good at feelings. When Lord Shaftesbury wrote about commonsense he meant a common way of feeling, with its humour, as well as a common way of understanding.

When it comes to understanding, the English are gifted at empirical research and discovery. The rules of the Royal Society for Science (established 1660) tend to determine what is empirical, namely observation and experiment. What cannot be observed or made an object of experiment, is the human feeling itself, though Lonergan, with his General Empirical Method, allows subjective states such as feelings to be a matter of phenomenological record and so the basis for further analysis.

There is a prejudice against subjectivity for is it not prone to provide excuses for anything, is it not just a matter of momentary impulses and so completely unreliable? How can one be in any way objective about subjectivity? Yet the fact is that subjectivity can be trained up to make accurate observations in the laboratory and without subjects fascinated by a question, there would be no discovery.

The way to explore subjectivity would appear to be to apply to it the rules of observation and experiment. It becomes all a matter of stimuli and brain waves.

Generalised empirical method has to deal with the problem that the only consciousness we are aware of is our own, but it is in fact with the help of others that we have entered the world of language and symbols, the world mediated by meaning and motivated by values. This world has an objective character, illustrated by the fact that for certain crimes we go to prison.

The world mediated by meaning and motivated by value is intentional, and so teleological. It is true that the organs of the body have a purpose; the liver, the kidney, and so forth. We may or may not know about this hidden teleology, but when something enters into consciousness, like feeling hungry, we have to do, or not do something about it. The chap who got to seventy stone, understanding that chocolate was contributory, could have reduced his intake. The ancient Greeks thought conception occurred when the North Wind blew down souls. An understanding of conception brings the matter into conscious intentionality. Morality has to deal with what is consciously experienced but also with what is theoretically understood. What is theoretically understood can come to have the solidity of a concrete fact. Our conscious world has an element provided by sense experience and an element mediated by meaning.

What is mediated by meaning may be hypothetical, possible, probable, certain, more certain, or infallible. It is confusing perhaps to discover that there are degrees of certainty. They verge, in some matters, on the infallible. So obesity is related to nutrition, the heartbeat is vital for circulation of the blood, the Battle of Hastings happened in 1066, and for a Christian believer, God became man.

Such reflection is, I think, largely foreign to the English, who, coming upon a problem would like to know ‘the facts’. It would be more intelligent to ask for the data on certain matters and even a question as to how the data were collected. It was Aristotle who said “One swallow does not make a summer.”

The factual world of the Englishman is quite metaphysical in the sense that it goes far beyond what can be seen and touches on atoms and subatomic particles, black holes, big bangs, CO2 emissions, global warming. Hawkins’ book “A Brief History of Time” was for a while on every shelf.

Psychology is a strange world which would appear to show that our conscious actions result from subconscious drives. The Englishman hopes that his sanity will carry him through and perhaps a double whiskey will help the process. Free will and responsibility are matters for judges to decide in law courts. There is good luck and bad luck and good luck is mainly a matter of money and health.

Feelings are activated mainly by sport and politics, traffic jams and the weather. They lie more or less unnoticed in family live but can be activated by a crisis such as sickness. Feelings focus around animals, drink and good meals. The Englishman may be sentimental about animals but leads the world in the hospice movement and the care of the dying.

Sex is a sort of joker in the pack. Its pleasure is made awkward by two facts, procreation, and interpersonal relations – even a crazy malady called love. Procreation is dealt with mechanically by contraception and if that fails (as it often does) by abortion. Any interpersonal relation is a huge check on natural egoism and therefore sex must be placed in an impersonal context based on some sort of financial exchange, whether within or without marriage. Confucius pointed out the problem with women is they become familiar.

Though it is constructed as little as possible on the basis of emotion and as much as possible on financial mutual convenience, the family is the pride and source of identity of the Englishman and if it should unaccountably vanish from around him, its want is supplied by a gossamer of dreams and memories.

The Church is a carry-over from an ignorant past but may somehow be a source of social networking, or even a certain social distinction, the dog collar for example. It moves asymptotically to a point of zero significance which it nearly but never quite reaches. The dogmas which set the path to Heaven and the path to Hell have given way to niceness which reaches out to everyone and which can be ignored by nearly everyone.

To be a gentleman was the nineteenth century ideal; to pay one’s bills, to have a familiarity with the Greeks, never to show one’s learning. I fear this ideal has given way to the charming rogue, who gains an income in some strange way and can afford to entertain on champagne and canapés, maybe even in 10 Downing Street. The black coated banker, model of prudence and propriety, has given way to the high class charmer with his high class bonuses.

I have been painting a picture of ‘English’ life based on the empirical method of 1660, observation, and experiment, but a life which somehow allows emotion to seep through, to provide a basis for the discernment of values. It is worth noticing that among our German cousins, feelings are dismissed as a source of values by Leibniz and Kant. Right conduct emerges from punctiliar knowledge, An exception in the German world is Oitinger, a Swabian pietist, who did not dismiss feelings as momentary affects, but regarded them as expressions of divinely implanted instincts.

Oitinger here is not in line with my understanding of Lutheranism, for I have thought that for Luther human nature itself was fallen, whereas for Oitinger, instinct is a good telling of the divine order and plan. The Catholic idea is that nature is good and therefore its instincts are good, but that nature fallen is darkened in understanding and decisive power and mortal. Oitinger though, got his ideas from Lord Shaftesbury –‘common sense’ – but I think, intensified Shaftesbury in the ecclesial world. In Christ, we are one body – and informing one body, one mind.

Oitinger was a heretic – at least that is how he was brought up, but maybe for us ‘orthodox’ he raises the question of what are the divinely planted instincts in nature? I got a certain resonance with some Confirmation candidates when I suggested “They want to make something out of their lives”. Marriage and family life subordinate to that. Maybe Freudian psychology with its psychological mechanism, should recognise a subordination here. Of course, with St Augustine – “You have made us yourself, dear Lord, and our hearts are restless till they rest in you” – we recognise a sort of instinct to the divine. With Lord Shaftesbury, we recognise a common sense, a movement to the common good, about which there is humour and a mutuality of feelings. Lonergan has our subjectivity in a spontaneous orientation to fellow feeling. He has feeling escorting our subjectivity as a quasi operator in the delight of sensation, the curiosity of enquiry, the detachment of judgement, the emotions needed for decision and action, and the permanent emotional states brought about by religious, family and social commitment. Things known but unseen, like the embryo, fall under this emotions and moral concern.

History and Tradition

2010-02-15T09:37:00.001-08:00

Question and Answer

2010-02-15T09:36:00.001-08:00

The way we shape up a question shapes up the answer. Some questions hardly require insight. If I say x = 2 + 2, then I can move automatically to x = 4, but so could a computer.

In the nursery there are questions about the meaning of words. A child learns about 6,000 words by the time he or she is six. It must be a considerable preoccupation to learn about three words a day. Alongside names, there is learning to string them along in sentences and the little one knows he has got something right by the way the adults respond. Through meanings, values, obligations, feelings, we move into a commonsense world which is also historically conditioned. The history of a people has phases of advance or decline. Chastity may be an essential virtue, or permissive ways may seem to be the challenging norm.

The world of commonsense opens to the world of food and drink; farming and cooking; religion and law; television; radio and DVDs; books and opera; working; earning; getting a pension for one’s old age; driving the car and getting it through the MOT; getting a passport. Everywhere there are practical questions and answers to be found. We enter a world which is related to us and which we contribute to. If it is a world of values as well as meanings, then it is a world of right and wrong, a world of obligations and so a world of feelings, of merit or blame, a world in which we live with a clear or guilty conscience. In this world it is worth noticing that if an obligation is not technically specific, it is ineffectual. Some people live in a world where they might kneel down beside the bed to say their prayers but they say them in bed. Some live in a world where they ought to do so, and either do or do not do so.

I think what I have said so far applies to primitive culture as well as that more developed state we recognise as civilisation. Here there are different tasks and skills and rewards, and politics and law sort out right order. With the primitive culture, personal reality is tied up with the corporate structure and its leader – so when David weeps for Absalom, the solders mourn with him, even though they had been happy when Absalom was killed. So ‘The Flag’ in America or ‘The Crown’ in Britain provide a primitive sense of unity in a society grown mega efficient and quite oblivious to an individual story.

Through Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the discovery of mind and the power of the question were released, and the result was a set of categories that could belong to answers to questions. So predicates to subjects were a matter of substance, quality, quantity, relation, action, passion, place, time, posture, and habit, giving dynamism to explain any changes in things were four causes, efficient, final, material, and formal. For Aristotle, the world was perhaps eternal, so he did not, as Aquinas did, have God as what one might call the existential cause. “God made all things, visible and invisible, out of nothing”. (Lateran Council 1215).

The advantage of a theory of causes is that it allows one to answer the question “Why?” with “Because”. “Why?” looks for a reason and “Because” gives the reason for any regular occurrence. The world of chance was for Aristotle not a matter for explanation. Why does a cow have horns? – it is its form. Why is it skinny? – poor matter i.e. poor grass. Why does the farmer keep it? To sell it to the butcher (final cause). Why does he whack it with a stick? To get it to go through the gate (efficient cause).

So for Aristotle everything could be explained up to a point. St Thomas could broaden the field with creative causation with providence, with the supernatural understood analogously to the natural, so that theology became a science which made use of Aristotle’s philosophy as a handmaid. The system sort of broke down before God’s infinity. One can ask what is the form of a cow? but the form of God is simply to be: “I am He who is”. Form as we know it in creatures is a limiting thing – so cows don’t have wings.

Physics broke the mould by asking not about ‘form’ but about the wider aspect of things, about how things relate to each other, how with two bits of matter a force arises between them called gravity, the force depending on the amount of matter and weakening as things are further apart according to not just the distance but the distance squared. Mathematics gets brought in to expound the matter. Restriction to observation and experiment is the rule brought in by the Royal Society, 1660. We enter a world which knows more and more about physics, geology, botany, biology, and the physical aspect of psychology. Such knowledge has made use of probability theory as well as mathematical laws. Upon analysis it is seen to deal with correlation rather than causality. Its capacity is limited by the limited power of telescopes and microscopes. Over the next hundred years or so, one might find it heading asymptotically to a sort of limit. Empirical science one might suggest, with technology, marks our world as modern, with population moving from 1 billion in 1800 to 2 billion in 1900 to 6 billion now. The question one asks in empirical science is “What is the relationship of A to B?”. It is not a question found in Aristotle. It gives a world controlled increasingly by man. Since God is not part of scientific method, there is a tendency in modern culture to agnosticism or even atheism.

Our notion of questions set off in the nursery with words and their meanings. It moves into a commonsense world and then, with Aristotle, into a scientific world much making use of logic. Modern empirical science makes use of logic, but the stress is on method and on a collaboration going on with different sorts of experts all focussed round a new emerging question. Is swine flu changing its spots? Is global warming due to CO2? The detachment with which a question is considered should be maintained even if the answers are apocalyptic – else how should the world of commonsense trust the judgement of scientists?

History proceeds by a different method from the natural sciences but, since the 19th century, it has aspired to a similar status in the world of thought to that of the natural sciences. The Germans, with Geisteswissenschaften, distinguished a new object, the reconstruction of the constructions of the human spirit. History moves beyond the mere facts in their particularity and beyond reliance on reliable testimony, to a collaborative effort which assembles all the evidence about a particular matter. So, while I don’t suppose it has happened yet, one might find an historian using psychological theory and investigating William the Conqueror’s relation with his mother to understand the 1066 behaviour. With historians too, we find collaboration and cooperation around a particular question. Since the object of study is human, the rich human development of the historian is needed for the master. What I have said about history applies to the social sciences in general, I think.

Theology, having with Thomas Aquinas (of 1274), relied on Aristotle, finds itself with a new question, since Aristotle is not the basis of modern science or modern history. What sort of philosophy should it base itself on now that Aristotle has, in an important way, been superseded? The second Vatican Council (1961-1964) did not answer the question, but in an implicit way recognised it, for I think it only quoted Aquinas once. Here is a great question for the Church, which just begins to dawn. God forbid that it should take schism and heresies for it to become clear but maybe current lapses alone make the point. It is essential that the proclamation of the gospel should be clear to everyone, to scientists, to historians and to the multitude influenced by a science dominated culture.

Emergent probability is the realisation that things are in development, even surprising development. It relates not just to the empirical but also to conscious discoveries and artistic achievements. It relates closely to Providence and to hope which sees the endless future of man and his world as in God’s hands. Hope enables one to take on poor situations with a love which is redemptive and so constructive.

Dialectic understanding is that there are different stances in the world and so there is the clash of truth and error. There are positions and counter positions; bias, dramatic, egoistic, group or general, justified itself by some ideology. The conversions, psychic, intellectual moral and religious, give the positions which are assailed by counter positions. The counter positions show up in history rather than science but they crystallise themselves in philosophy. Here the more fruitful option seems to be “develop positions” rather than “reverse counter positions” for such reversal might be very long and tedious.

Conversion to love – in the family, in the wide world, and to godparents, a context of value in which facts are reassessed and in which deliberation seeks the action which expresses and fosters love. Such love itself needs to be explained as far as possible, and the teaching in the community which has long sought to live by this area, given the material for such explications; so Christian faith sees the source of such love in the gift of the Spirit given by Jesus to the Church. Faith and Theology find a vital root in reflection on conversion.

Augustine is credited with saying “Love and do what you will”. He actually said “Love God and do what you will”. We might add, “and act in the real world which you have come to know through all your questions and genuine answers”. Your loving action should then fulfil the petition! “Thy Kingdom Come”.

Human Cognition and Experience (Erlebneis

2010-02-15T09:32:00.000-08:00

The Levels of Intellect

2010-02-15T09:31:00.001-08:00

The idea of self appropriation is that intellect should be able to note itself in its different operations and become as familiar with them as we are with seeing when we open our eyes in daytime. The idea is that consciousness might be conscious of itself in a full way. By contrast would be the approach which thought that everything should be understood by studying the brain, with consciousness being indicated by a certain measureable sort of brain activity, valuable as such an approach might be.

To man belongs animal extroversion and the fringe of intelligence found in animals. So we move to the shade when it is too hot. There is pleasure and pain. This is the world of the nursery but it stays with us throughout life, for the most part helping us but also sometimes leading us astray. It is helpful to recall this basic level, for it is constantly operative. Without it scientists could not measure, historians could not read, artists could not paint and philosophers could not learn or communicate. Without it, the vast world of commonsense could not operate technology, make a living, or promote justice and welfare. So important is this world that one might imagine the only task of intellect is to see that things are working – this would be the pragmatic philosophy. David Hume tends to confine us to this world. It is the world most men live in most of the time it seems to them, though there may be a tinge of respect for science or religion.

In fact, the normal experience of man is to learn a language and move into a world which is wider and deeper than the world of animal extroversion. In the world mediated to us by meaning not everything can be seen, and though imagination may try to escort everything, it falters at mathematical infinity or for that matter, at geological time spans.

The world into which we grow up is mediated by meaning, motivated by value, charged with feeling. We are enormously shaped by a people we come to belong to, usually so that we should be upright and useful citizens, and sanctioning and encouraging our development there may be a religious tradition. Belief plays a huge part in this appropriation, and we cannot possibly verify everything we come to believe concerning fiction and history, science and philosophy, religion and morals.

In addition to the world of animal extroversion, we move into a world of truth and being, where truth in the mind corresponds with reality lying usually beyond the mind. To some sorts of truth, generalisation belongs – so the heartbeat causes circulation of the blood in all bodies- while other truths are unique, so William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066. Self appropriation is to do with noticing and understanding one’s own cognitional operations. Similarly, we find here that some things are generalisations and some things belong to us alone. So we all have questions from time to time – it is a general state of affairs like the heartbeat – but coming to dedicate our life in love is usually a unique story I imagine.

Animals have sorts of questions belonging to their extroversion – which way did the fox go? – but most human questioning goes on in a thought process which has become interior, so that we think using words, concepts, and images trying to find the answer to our question. Aquinas refers to “phantasm” and Lonergan to “schematic image” as part of the matter being used when we have a question.

Perhaps it is helpful to distinguish phantasm and schematic image in the following way. Phantasm provides us with all the materials which might be helpful in answering the question and we work on them, dismissing this, focussing on that until we find a perspective which is illuminating and which gives an insight which might be helpful. The perspective which is illuminating is the schematic image. The Greeks realised that diagrams were helpful. I think it was Socrates who asked a child to double a square but the child’s efforts produced four squares because he doubled each side. There was a person who wondered why the car wouldn’t start when the garage had checked everything. Attention focussed on the key. A different key had been used. I would love to know how to irrevocably evangelise England anew, and through England, pioneer in so many things, the world, but here is a question so huge that in each generation one can only add a mite to the solution. I recall recusant Catholics who found their way forward was “to show charity to their non-Catholic neighbours”. There are questions to which you do not have the complete answer.

Insight though might yield several different possible answers to a question. If it is a question about ontology, there is only one possible answer. If it is about conduct there may be several answers of increasing difficulty. I think an element here is that the more heroic path may have a greater risk of failure because of weakness. So St Thomas More decided not to be a priest for some reason (perhaps there is more than one reason?!) he felt attracted to marriage. This was a way forward he thought he had the grace to carry out.

I have been piling three intellectual levels together. One is the level of question and possible answer. So a possible answer to doubling the square is to double the sides. The next is the level of answers which are sure, in which the true judgement gives one a hold on reality. The next is the level of answers which relate to conduct – what should I do?

The modern world relates closely to the third level, but without the second level, so that charismatic, loving, and affectionate people would guide the world forward with an enthusiasm which blinds them to the importance of truth and reality. For such questions take one into the philosophic miasma. That miasma has to deal with modern science and modern history. It brings in thought in a heavy and life demanding way. So easily it is dismissed. All you need is goodness, all you need is love. If a person is brought to you in the jungle with appendicitis, certain medical knowledge and skill would assist love to express itself, but it is to be acquired only through a process of training.

In ordinary language, idealism is what belongs to youth before a cynical realism breaks in on one’s living. In philosophic terminology, idealism is the idea that there is the life of the mind, there are meanings and values man cares for, but they are not related to reality since what is real lies beyond us. Critical realism is the position that we can know what is real. It sees in scientific truth sometimes the absolute attainment of truth and sometimes an asymptotic approach to the truth. Science is espoused in its positions and developments, and history in its succession of narratives. Certain absolutes are attained in the process of self appropriation including the capacity to be absolutely certain.

This then is human nature with the precepts to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible. Providence places human nature in the context of a love which coming from God raises the whole level of meaning and value. Stirred by such love, the individual and the group must account for it and keep it alive. Theology is thus reflection on conversion, but it is this reflection going on in a new context. So in 1800, before the geologists, no one guessed at the age of the earth. The new idea emerging raises huge questions about the Bible and its Babylonian cosmology. With the benefit of a certain hindsight, one can say that the written Word of God is concerned with revelation, with giving to man a revelation which he could not attain by his own natural powers. So we praise three persons in one God, Father, Son, and Spirit.

Determinism and Freedom

2010-02-15T09:29:00.000-08:00

Our culture is rightly massively influenced by science, but the scientific outlook is easily a deterministic one, for every atom follows Newton’s exact laws expressed by the equation F=MA. It was argued that if you knew the exact situation at one time you could predict any subsequent situation. Obviously, since a person is made up of atoms, personal conduct, though it gives the illusion of freedom and responsibility, must also be determined by atomic masses and forces.

If you read the last chapter of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, you find the same determinism controlling human life, despite the fact that he has portrayed the heights and the depths of human life and love, with characters like Pierre and Natasha.

Obviously the idea of such determinism is fatal for the religious outlook, or for that matter, for a humanist outlook which has a concern for rights and duties. A community massively influenced by the scientific outlook needs also to be massively influenced by the religious outlook, but how is this possible? One can see a task here for philosophy.

I recall solving the problem for myself by what I called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. I noticed that Christianity could not get along without simple things like bread, wine, and water. These things I saw as things to be understood in their own right and used appropriately. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness was to see atoms as the only real things. I granted that any material thing could be broken down into the atoms which composed it but I did not grant that the atoms could tell you everything about bread or for that matter about man.

I realised that I was affirming the commonsense world as a sort of starting point and I realised that science itself depended on commonsense as well, as when a chemist picks up a pipette for example.

I was helped further by the Aristotelian and Thomism philosophy of matter and form. Prime matter is potency to form. Every material existent is formed. Form has to take account of underlying matter. So it occurred to me that every atom was formed, and so it was unlikely that each atom was identical with another, any more than snowflakes are identical. There was a Catholic philosopher, Donceel, who claimed God could not put a human soul into a cow, because the matter was not suitably formed. I suppose this idea gets rid of the Hindu idea that we might in the next life come back as a snake or a dog, but it raises questions about the degree of formation needed for the information of a human soul. Back in the 1960s, before abortion had become legal, it seemed possible to consider various stages before the infusion of a soul. I suppose one could argue on the one hand that a cow’s brain was not capable of rational thought, but that the human fertilised embryo, though not yet conscious, is capable of developing a brain capable of rational thought. What you have then is not a potential human being but a human being in potential (as we all are in deep sleep).

Lonergan is a Thomist, but he works up to the matter form position using classical science with its rules and also using statistical theory, probability theory. Indeed, he calls the position he arrives at “emergent probability” which he equates with divine providence.

He would point out that even in a laboratory there are alien influences. The measurements taken do not make an exact line. The arrival of probability theory gives one more knowledge, not less. So one knows that an asteroid follows closely Newton’s laws, but if you want to know the chance of a large asteroid hitting the earth in this decade you need to study the past and see with what frequency they have done so in previous centuries. Probability theory is not a cloak for ignorance. Rather it extends knowledge.

If you throw a dice six times and you get six sixes, you will be suspicious that it is weighted. If you throw it 100 times and get 100 sixes, you will know something unusual is going on.

If you have a chemical environment with many different complex carbon based molecules, you will occasionally get the same complex molecule again. If though you get a molecule nourishing itself, using a digestive system and then dividing itself, something different is going on. You have got a new sort of thing, more stable, always there.

If by a Canon of Parsimony you confine yourself simply to the empirical evidence, then what you have is the emergence of something unexpected, something prepared for by the previous situation, but something one would describe as biological rather than chemical. If at an earlier stage of things one had been able to observe a total set of subatomic particles assembling themselves into atoms, one would be able to observe that they formed themselves according to MendAlien subsequent table. Stage A is observable; Stage B is observable, and by insight one can explain what makes Stage B so different from Stage A. The Canon of Parsimony confines the empirical scientist to describing what he can observe and explaining what he observes. What is to be observed is the arrival of new realities on the stage; the stage thereby is changed, and further realities are enabled to emerge. Such emergence has a probability because it happens again and again and such emergencies going on again and again have led to our commonsense world with its bread, wine, and water, but without water you would not have bread or wine.

I met a scientist who was describing how an embryo grows. Suddenly an arm begins to emerge. He described the wonder of it by saying form appears to precede matter. Since it happens again and again there is a probability of it. What happens is not predictable simply from the material substrate.

What emerges are not just new species but a new environment containing many species in the interdependence that constitutes an ecology in which each finds a supporting environment. The scientist can anticipate the emergence. The theologian sees the finger of God and the introduction of new forms. There are schemes of recurrence of the pattern if A then B, if B then C, and if C then A, so if parents then children, if children then growing up, if growing up then parents.

The same probable emergence of new schemes of recurrence goes on in human life, so for example, if fish then fishing, if fishing then nets, if nets then boats, if boats then plenty of fish, if plenty of fish, population growth. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. So the materials for Newton were prepared by Galileo and others. So there is emergent probability working in philosophy as well as in science and since we must see the finger of God in emergent probability, we must anticipate emergent probability in the Church as well. Does this mean we anticipate a new saint – or perhaps something more like a new ecology, so that a richer supportive environment comes about for many?

Contrasted with my early claim of misplaced concreteness, the theory of emergent probability is at home in our modern world with its awareness of the long term evolution which has gone on in the physical environment (de Chardin’s Cosmogenesis) and the development in man’s world through historical process (anthropogenesis). While one might posit emergent probability in general communication going on between God and Man – “in many and various ways God spoke to our ancestors” - I think that with the Christian mystery we have to speak directly of Providence for we are called by Christ to faith, but we find in the Church a “scheme of recurrence”, - the Sacramental system, and we find the emergence of a new order of affairs marked by the fruits of the Spirit – “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self control”. There is ever a rich environment for a new generation of faith.

If philosophical achievement has led through emergent probability to the possibility of a philosophy of philosophies this might allow the emergence of a theology of theologies. For God would speak with commonsense consciousness in all its varieties, but also with differentiated consciousness, whether scientific, scholarly, artistic, or philosophic. Faith is a common assent. The rich responses made need to speak to each other and support each other including, of course, the assent made by the successor of St Peter.

The Levels of Intellect

2009-09-19T12:59:00.002-07:00

Determinism and Freedom

2009-09-19T12:59:00.001-07:00

The Contemporary Task of Philosophy

2009-06-30T11:33:00.001-07:00

The world we live in is described as modern, or sometimes post modern. It has an expanding population of six billion needing to be clothed and fed, and ecology in need of greater care in countless ways. Not only common sense but technical expertise is needed to keep everything running.

Behind the world of technical expertise is an ongoing world of scientific discovery which leaps forward remarkably. There is also an ongoing world of historical, sociological, and psychological scholarships which deals with what has stirred man in various ways at various times and places. Religion could be subsumed under religious studies here, so that it might become a matter once vital for various peoples, but now fading away.

Or it should be noticed that for some, religion is alive and well and a vital matter in personal and group contact. So we find, beyond the common sense world, a world of science, scholarship, and religion. Keats wrote “Ever let the fancy roam, pleasure never is at home” and in the roaming of fancy we find the realm of art, which can bring refreshment to the human spirit.

Human meanings develop in collaboration so we find developments in science, scholarship, religion, and art. The creation of terminology belongs to the group so we witness a Tower of Babel effect, wherein scientists live in one theoretical world, scholars another, religious people another and artistic people another and the idea that there should be some sort of communication which runs across these developing areas seems impossible.

Philosophy produces different stances. Some think that the only truth lies with empirical science and so the age of philosophy is over. Or some think its purpose is to chart the different meanings of terms as they are used in ordinary speech. Some think human studies should be value free whereas others are open to values so long as God is excluded. The phenomenologists would describe and the existentialists decide. Is there some way of bringing the philosophical world together so that it can address the world we find with its huge tasks and its specialised developments?

The recognition that there are different sorts of norms to be recognised in different sorts of activities is perhaps a starting point. So if you are riding in a bike race you need to look to your diet, or you won’t have enough energy. If you are looking after children, there are again norms about diet and also about conduct. The children might set the house on fire. There are norms around what it is to be a responsible parent. A failure to fulfil responsible norms which one recognises leads to a feeling of guilt.

So, according to one’s goal an appropriate norm is to attend to the data. If you are a bank clerk, you should count the notes in the wad carefully, but if you are a painter, you should note how the sunlight falls on the wad. We all live in the same world but we notice things differently according to the purposes which occupy us, “our memories, associations, a structure and one’s emotive and expressive reactions”. Sensation is rarely just raw sensation but rather a perception of some sort, and the perception to be worthy needs according to one’s purpose, to fulfil certain norms.

So sometimes I set myself the task of doing some reading, but sometimes I find I am quite distracted so that as the words pass before my eyes, I find I am not there, I am somewhere else. I have a choice – somehow to recall myself to the task in hand, or set myself the different task of finding out what it is that is occupying me, and preoccupying me. To read without taking in what is said, fails to fulfil the norm ”be attentive”.

One might say that the norm of being attentive is purely subjective, but if a painter only occasionally noticed the little matter of light and shade, his colleagues and critics would point out the fact and make him aware that his subjective fault had an objective set of consequences which, attended to, would bring him round to a better performance. I think one can see that in the scientific world and the scholarly world, the example of others and their advice helps subjectively to attain a better standard, to recognise the norms of subjectivity.

In a social discipline such as science, one can recognise the influence of others, but it is perhaps not out of place to note the development from the id to the ego, from the ego to the self, and from the self to the affirmation of individual identity. The id is the subconscious ordination to pleasure, survival and procreation and so the source of instinctual unfolding. The ego is that unfolding coming under the influence of archetypes which are sociologically carried. There are things appropriate for a boy or for a girl. Sex is here an archetypal controller. Or “Every little boy or girl that’s born alive is either a little Liberal or a Conservative”. I heard of a little boy wild about dressing up, and I felt sorry for him, for somehow the archetype had not been communicated through the subtle world of praise and blame. The ego then is shaped by archetypes. Imagine a little king – everyone should bow to him! The ego could rule a life, but the emergence of the self is something different. The self has projects and sacrifices to make to bring an achievement to fruition. It takes its cue from the world it finds and the opportunities presented. A sense of identity may be achieved and a reputation established. The affirmation of identity is not just a matter of the present and the future, but also of the past. I am the same one who has passed through infancy, the carelessness of schooldays, the discipline of study, a marriage, successful or not etc, etc. Potencies have been unfolding, but all along the same one has been engaged. There have been mistakes – I bear the scars. There have been sins – there is the task of repentance and reparation. There is the dawn of holiness. I recognise this identical self in its development is set for eternity.

So man inescapably finds himself set in a religious context. Facing fearsome problems in time one may seek to escape but can you escape from being the self that you are? Religion brings a transformation of that self to a self that is loved and, through the vicissitudes of life, learning to love. The transformation, so full of meaning, gives rise to a further specialisation as it is reflected upon, so in addition to commonsense, science, scholarships and art, we find theology, resulting from “in loveness” dominating the meaning of life.

If one remains with the scholastics and the priority of metaphysics, then one would be able to conclude that the supernatural infinitely outweighs the natural. The natural is its own order, but the supernatural is the middle ground between infinite divinity and mortal and indeed sinful humanity. There is upon man, the endless task of conversion from a simply natural set of demands to the demands and gifts of God Himself, whose ways are not our ways.

If one shifts from the metaphysical outlook, which gives one first, principles from which to make valid deductions, to the outlook which recognises the human subject himself in his authentic recognition of the norms governing subjectivity, then the infinite outweighing of the natural by the supernatural becomes the fact that it is love and God’s love that gives meaning to one’s life and there is nothing else, even a metaphysical first principle, that can outweigh the existential fact.

Such a realisation is not automatically matched by a flawless performance, for life has many demands and distractions and so the love of God when realised, sets in motion a process of conversion lasting over a lifetime in which the gift of love is more profoundly acknowledged and more efficaciously responded to. One can blandly say that washing up is part of God’s will but one’s motivation easily descends to the pragmatic, whereas conversion is concerned with that motivation as consciously moving. There is then, a luminous intensification possible and monastic life might help it. Intensification is a taking thought, a getting interested, a gaining of insights and a context in which to express them, a coalescence of insights so that a person’s inner structure develops and changes moving towards Christian, or other religious maturity in a development which may be experienced as crushingly slow. Still, understanding does develop and moves towards fullness as it embraces in the mystery but increasingly clearly all that God has made and plans. With concern for one’s development, others and the world a clear moral dimension emerges. Concern with values and the invisible ground of love brings awareness of the potency of mind and so also an intellectual conversion.

A metaphysical analysis reveals the mind as capax omnia, as unlimited in its scope but awareness of the priority of love gives mind its task in discerning the right order of things against “all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men”, and so the task of overcoming evil with good and lies with truth. The world is in greater measure than one realises, a conspiracy which consents to evil.

The spirit blows where it will. The above analysis is derived from a Christian context, of course, but is philosophical rather than theological and so might be acceptable to any person of a different tradition. It shows philosophy to be not just the love of wisdom, but the wisdom which acknowledges its grounding in love. It is a wisdom which recognises subjective norms, which are objective and binding and shows such norms to exist where consciousness is differentiated scientifically, in a scholarly way; in an artistic way; in a religious way and indeed, in a philosophical way which is authentic and recognises norms arising from consciousness itself. So there is a norm not to waste one’s life sleeping!

Matter, Form, Potency and Act

2009-06-30T11:23:00.000-07:00

It is true that one can construct an abstract notion of human nature and make certain deductions. Medicine does this very successfully, but the very success of medicine witnesses to another dimension which always belongs to man in the concrete, namely historicity. There was a time when nothing was known about DNA – now every year adds to man’s knowledge in a historical development.

Certain developments belong to all, affecting the culture, the set of meanings, values, and beliefs that inform life. One cannot avoid the fact that the Jewish people had a uniquely important historical experience over two millennia before Christ and indeed subsequently. Nor can one avoid the arrival of Christianity on the stage and the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine. There are first millennium conciliar teachings about the Trinity and Christology; there are second millennium schisms and the divide of the Western Church by the Reformation, a movement which appears not have affected the Greek Orthodox Church.

While nature can simply be explored as a constant that yields up its secrets in greater and greater and greater degree, history does not manifest a simple progress with everyone growing closer and closer in mind and heart. There are radically different stances and one cannot avoid being brought up within one tradition or another.

The fact that we are shaped by tradition becomes clearer as human studies develop. The Enlightenment thought mankind might have a new start, basing everything on reason, and a golden future beckoned in which man-made progress would lead mankind into sunny uplands. The idea of Progress became the leitmotif in late Victorian and the early Edwardian age, foundering in the First World War. Freedom from tradition does not mean freedom from ideology. It is as if Reason is fine once you find the first principle, but how do you find the first principle?

What science witnesses to is not a set of first principles but rather a method which leads to discovery. With natural science the discovery concerns nature and so is universal. With historical science, “The geisteswissenschaften”, the discovery concerns another people at another time, and how and why they acted as they did. Religious beliefs show up as a regular component in the historical shaping of man, so you get a sociology of religion and also religious studies.

So religion was found by Durkheim to help man in his vital social commitments, for example to marriage or to the State. It was found to be a principle guiding societies by Talcott-Parsons, or I suppose in our present society, one might say not guiding Society! Obviously a society with a common religious tradition has values which have to be respected, and so it has a basis for praise and blame. The finding of such values on a purely rational basis is not unproblematic. So I think the present government would like to be able to define what it is to be British, but rightly finds it beyond them. Life for most people does not in the end come down to supporting a cricket team, or even a political party. The different religions of the world seek in their different ways to express the ultimate meaning and value of human life, and the Christian might find here expression of the fact that God gives all men sufficient grace to be saved.

Are we in a position to lay down a common historical tradition for mankind today? That tradition everywhere has to be founded upon the practicality of making a living and doing so in an ecologically sustainable way. The discovery that animals and so man depends on a habitat, goes back I think to the 1950s.

It includes the discovery of mind with the Greeks. According to Jaspers this discovery was an axial moment going on in some way with other cultures. That discovery in the West led to a “tinge” of theoretical consciousness, so that, for example, Athanasius could make his rule. That tinge has allowed dogmas to be expressed and sciences to develop, so that modern science as an ongoing reality belongs to mankind’s common historical tradition.

Modern man is aware of different histories and different cultures, of the geisteswissenschaften, of the idea that man’s different concerns and achievements at different times can be increasingly understood and expressed. Such work is value free to the extent that, if one is to reconstruct the constructions of the human spirit, one should not fall silent when one discovers an aberration, for example, the religious aberration of child sacrifice, or the slaughter of the infidel. Such study is likely to show up historical folly and perhaps indicate more fruitful paths in the present. So, for example, the Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations in 1949, while in some ways it perhaps went too far and in other ways not far enough, pointed to a common moral kernel for mankind, affirmed from recent aberrations.

While the scientific and the historical differentiations of consciousness have had their axial moment, perhaps the artistic differentiation, with its undoubted masters, has not. It has lost touch with religion and perhaps sometimes with meaning and feeling. It has something to do with communicating beauty in its embodiment of meaning and value, to the multitude.

The religious differentiation has its supreme moment in the Paschal Mystery but perhaps an axial moment was December 7th 1965, when the Vatican Council published its Declaration on Religious Liberty. About this supremely important exercise of understanding and responsibility there should be no coercion.

Philosophy has been caught up in worlds of metaphysics, religion, science and more recently personal decision. Alongside man’s growing knowledge then, is the human subject who makes the advances. I suppose it must have been about 1951 that Lonergan, writing his book Insight, (published 1957) descried the structure of the human subject and the norms, “Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible”. This was something axial. Man’s faltering performance is assisted by the mystery of love which surrounds, touches and informs human living but here we deal with religion.

Alongside human nature then, our human living in the modern world is informed by modern science, modern history by modern art which has, it seems, yet to find its axial moment, by religion moving to find common ground and by a philosophic achievement which shows man as formed by tradition, as capable of critical assessment, as bound to be constructive. This group of historicity as a compound with nature should help all things forward.

The recognition of man in the concrete as a compound of historicity and nature means that “progress” needs to include historicity as well as nature, so that just as there is care for the public health, so there should be care for the different communities. Logically, if we care for the Welsh speakers, we should care for the Polish speakers and all peoples with strange dialects, but perhaps it is not unreasonable to care that all share a common language. So too, there are different religions but again, all religions should recognise “nature” and also “historicity”. The recognition of historicity should mean the glad recognition that the same God is working in other groups.

The recognition of historicity should make the natural sciences realise that their competence is not about every matter. It is beyond the competence of a natural scientist to dismiss God, or for that matter to decide in favour of this or that religion. Different sorts of questions require different sorts of method.

Religion may find itself involved in various historical affirmations, but of course, that does not mean competence in all such affirmations. The community of historians have their own methodology moving from evidence to conclusion. They can enrich a religion with a yet more inspiring description of their past.

Beauty is transcendent, belonging to God, as well as belonging to material forms, but I think one might claim that without beauty, feelings are not stirred, and without refinement of beauty, feelings are not refined. The common sense world waits on the artist to find the way forward.

Maybe as philosophy descries the task of natural science and of history and as it may open man to the divine, so it may help the world of art to find anew its soul in this modern world and so to greatly help the multitude.

Historicity and Foundations

2009-06-30T11:20:00.000-07:00

The Role of Philosophy

2009-06-30T11:16:00.000-07:00

Early man, as well as hunting and gathering, appears to have been much caught up in myth and magic. Early religion appears to have known spiritual ecstasy and promoted it by such things as mushrooms and physical exercises. One can see dangers here, especially when problems such as drought were faced, for religion would be interpreted by myth and myth does not have a means of criticising meanings and coming to know the truth and the right thing to do, so easily enough man found himself the victim of his own mythic powers and bound to cruel activities such as human sacrifice, even the sacrifice of children. It is a mark of its divine inspiration that the Old Testament, living in such a world, is entirely free of child sacrifice, though the story of Abraham and Isaac shows that such a thing was “in the air”.

Philosophy is the discovery of mind, the discovery of a yardstick man, from his human resources, can bring to bear on things human and divine, and indeed on the natural world around. So before atoms were thought of men thought everything was composed of earth, air, fire and water. The Greek philosophers do not seem to have hit on the idea of creation. The myths accounted for the beginning of things. The early philosophers seem to have thought the world had always been there and perhaps always would be. Recurrence was a theme. They thought the divine worked within them helping them to develop their understanding. Aristotle thought one should follow this inner light, and this way perhaps become divine.

Life presented man with an option: to go for power and pleasure and praise but in this way to lose one’s own self. Pride leads to a fall; or to seek truth and excellence in a genuinely human way under the guidance of God. Aristotle studies virtues and vices in a rigorous and systematic way, finding that virtue was a middle path between excess and lack. So courage lies between cowardice and foolhardiness. St Thomas Aquinas found he could accept many of Aristotle’s conclusions.

Greek philosophy then was something like a religion with a way of life. It belonged, of course, to an elite and the way of life was based on slavery.

An important conclusion they reached was that either a thing was, or it was not. There was no middle ground for being. There was a missionary in Japan who came across the idea held by the religious leaders there, that there were many different paths to Heaven. He argues with them for several years about there being no middle ground between being and not being and eventually he won the argument and they all joined the Church with their people

St Thomas the Apostle took the faith to Kerala, India. He founded a church which still exists, but the mission did not flourish and convert India. I recall Bishop Butler noting how “Christianity went West” and he suggested this was not just because of Roman roads and civilisation, but because Greek philosophy permeated the Western world.

Lonergan makes the same point in discussing the Council of Nicea. The fathers were Greek and their culture had a philosophical “tincture” so that it was possible to make statements about statements, so you get the Athanasian rule that whatever one says of the Father, one must say of the Son, except that the Father is the Father and the Son the Son. The key word at Nicea, homoouson, did not come from philosophy but from cloth merchants – it meant “of the same stuff”.

Cardinal Newman in his book on Arianism makes an extraordinary statement. Emanating from Babylon, there were in 325AD 56 Archbishoprics spreading into China and North India. These fell prey to Arianism and so, 300 years later, to the Moslem religion. Was the reason for this the lack of a philosophic tincture to the general culture, so that the rules for apprehending the meaning of the Council of Nicea were not comprehensible and so not effective?

This story shows the value of “a philosophic” tincture belonging to a culture. It perhaps provides a link in conversation with Moslems and explains the great devotion they have to Jesus and Mary. It perhaps also suggests the importance of a philosophic tincture for the Church and the world today.

While the philosophic spirit exposed the mythological basis around ancient public religions, it is valuable to notice that for around 2,000 years, from 500BC to 1600AD, philosophy and religion went hand in hand, especially in the immense scholastic achievement running from 1070 to 1274, which came to use the metaphysics and logic of Aristotle in a systematic way. For the scholastics, philosophy was not regarded as autonomous but rather as the handmaid of theology. Especially important was the distinction between nature and grace (Philip the Chancellor, 1230). That very distinction though, grounded the possibility of natural science, of philosophy and of history developing in autonomous ways, so that science and history came to recognise their way forward, the canons which govern their methodical advance. So for science, the Royal Society (1660) recognised only observation and experiment and, perhaps for history, a key moment was the recognition that it is about the constructions, good or bad, of the human spirit.

In medieval times it was thought that Theology using Aristotle’s philosophy could address the whole of Western culture, but the development of Western Science involved dropping the link of thought with Aristotle. Scientific method uses mathematical correlation to anticipate physical correlation. The theories it holds are for the most part just the best at the moment. Correlation has replaced causality. Scientists and Theologians might talk about “truth”, but where the Theologian based on Aristotle, means knowledge of causes, the scientist means the best possible knowledge of correlations. Here is a problem for modern philosophy to address.

In history again, if one see history as the recording of events – so 1066, the Norman invasion of England – then what you have is a series of more or less definite facts. If though, history is to be the reconstruction of the constructions of the human spirit, then a development in psychology, or a development in sociology might give one new insights into the motivation of William the Conqueror. One makes progress not about points of certitude but rather about points that are less than certain.

What applies to our knowledge of William the Conqueror applies also to our knowledge of the prophet Isaiah. I think one can see that here, too, there is a problem for Theology. It is great to have greater knowledge of Isaiah, but it is problematic if definite prophecies – Virgo concipiet – become utterances with probable meanings.

Lonergan in writing of Christology and in recognising how studies endlessly move things forward, finds in the title given to Christ in every(?) new testament document – the Son of God - an irreversible starting point.

In a situation where Aristotle somehow needs to be broadened out so that he can cope with modern science and modern history, I find helpful his remark that one does not expect the same sort of reasoning from a politician as from a mathematician.

The conclusion of reasoning, “the truth” as we know it, was identified by Aquinas as being “Ens et verum convertuntur”. For Lonergan, a truth affirmed becomes part of a person’s horizon, and since it is communicable, part of man’s world. For Lonergan and others (Heidegger) as our knowledge of the world expands, so does our knowledge of the self.

If the only knowledge man can have is of empirical science, then he himself becomes a merely material object. Philosophers today may confirm or deny this. How does one base this further autonomous discipline?

Foundations

2009-06-30T11:12:00.000-07:00

Economic Supplement 10

2009-02-02T10:38:00.001-08:00

I notice that train travel is going up in cost. The reason given is that capital formation is needed. There is a distinction between capital repair (when things wear out) and capital formation, capital which increases the capacity of the railways to provide services.
Where there is new capital formation there will be new streams of revenue. The railways, instead of charging present customers more, should borrow the money from the banks, which, of course, should only lend where they see profitability, sharing the risk, uncertainty and profit of the outcome.
As a matter of fact, when capital needs replacement the new investment may well embody improvements, less fuel consumption for example. One needs to make a distinction then. The current price being charged for fares ought to cover capital repair. Capital improvement should be financed by ‘capitalists’, banks and any others prepared to share the ‘risk’.
Such a distinction might be described as notional. Something notional though can express an understanding; the understanding can be true; what is true expresses reality; reality grounds morality, responsibility and justice, which includes commutative justice.
The commuters who have ‘inelastic demand’ since they must get to work will find that their disposable income after paying for fares is reduced. So beyond injustice to passengers, the fare rise, in a marginal way, works against the recovery from the slump, since such recovery must envisage consumer demand being able to pay for what the economy can produce, a situation which requires not ‘a fall in inflation’ but a fall in prices across the board.
Commutative justice has to do with where a situation has changed. It is largely neglected by the modern state, but even on its utilitarian principles, is conveniently neglected. Suppose for example the tax threshold was £10,000 per annum. (It is less than that, I am ashamed to say) Suppose in a year prices go up by 10%. If my maths is correct, commutative justice would automatically raise the threshold for tax to £11,000 per annum. Not to respect such an obligation makes the State, even the utilitarian State into a robber baron, St Augustine’s phrase, I think. Commutative justice is a notion that needs activating in a thousand dormant, cobwebby and corrupt corners of our Constitution, flowing in with a power similar to the waters of Baptism.
I have been reading Robert Peston’s book ‘Who Runs Britain’. There are these mega blighters who operate more in billions than millions (note, American billions). They sometimes might bring about an improvement in the performance of a firm but sometimes not, it seems. I applaud improvements of course. But these blighters who cream off millions, according to Peston, are reducing pensions. The State too has been robbing pensions, and the Conservatives were guilty of this, preparing the way for Labour. The huge accumulations for pensions attract the eyes not just of personal profiteers but of the Robber Barons who rule us.
There is the business of rationalisation. The Profiteers like to explain how they are benefitting humanity. The Robber Barons need hardly justify themselves so long as they win the next election. Rationalisations abound. The Pope reminds us, ‘it is good to have a job’, but not any job surely. When rationalisations abound, Lonergan says, ‘what can clear the air but faith’. It is what we give that matters, not what we receive. ‘Where hatred sees only evil love reveals values. At once it commands commitment and joyfully carries it out.’ (Third Collection, 106)

How to Base Historical Consciousness

2009-02-02T10:36:00.001-08:00

From the nursery, by learning a language and attending to what people say, we move into a world mediated by meaning and motivated by value. But are the meanings true and are the values worthy of man?
So the history master is very keen on Agincourt, 1415, and on the excellence of the archers, and the message gets across that war is a good thing, especially if at the cost of 200 lives you slaughter 5000 Frenchmen. But from a Christian perspective this is a lamentable affray between Christian and Christian. The values being inculcated are not sound.
What then are sound values, and how does one find them? If one did find them would they mean the emasculation of man, so that never would he draw the longbow or pull the trigger? In the quest for genuine values ones personal authenticity is at stake. One finds, for example, over the use of force there is a considerable clash of position, ‘a dialectic’, and that the preparedness to use nuclear weapons on cities or dum-dum (explosive) bullets against terrorists means that our establishment has departed from just war theory and from human developments. A clash of values poses problems for conduct. Confucius said, ‘if you disagree with the government, change your country’. I sense that today that advice is not possible for many. In ones living, though, one has to consistently show forth the values one has come to recognise as vital.
Man’s own self, his sense of what he ought to care about, is caught up in his understanding of the world. That world might be cosmological (Babylonian, Ptolemaic, Evolutionary) but a considerable complexity gets added in to ones understanding of the world when one realises that the world of man is historical as well as cosmological. The self too gets correspondingly complex especially as our first formation in the way of meanings and values comes from parents and teachers who themselves are considerably shaped up by history. We take our first identity as well as our name from our background.
As a man leaves his parents and joins himself to his wife so a young person, whether consciously or not, faces a considerable challenge in finding their own way in the wide world. This may result in a considerable falling out and falling silent going on with parents when children are in their late teens. The resources for this great journey may be very limited. There is what they are studying which may be very mechano-morphic. There is the peer group which may be equally lost. In the process of achievement of independence a great deal in the way of faith and morals may be lost.
In a sort of clarification by contrast, I find myself thinking about the Franks who fearless in battle, combined the faith with their martial courage and did a great deal to promote Western Christendom, an achievement symbolised by the crowning of Charlemagne as Emperor on Christmas Day 800AD. Gibbon ascribed the energy of the tribal people to their purity of morals. They got married without worrying about property conditions or earning capacity. They stayed faithful or the male was not able to attend the assemblies where things were decided. They had children and needed action to feed them. The fault they had was not being keen about manual labour! What one sees here is that the vital values informing the community are challenging and informing the individual at every stage.
It is worth noticing here the public nature of religion. It is not just what a person does with their privacy. It shapes up the people, whether they are feeling pious or not. Trollop’s Dr. Thorne is disgusted by the grace said at the Duke of Omnium’s table for most of the people aren’t paying any attention. What Dr. Thorne does not notice is that those present are being reminded that they are Christian, despite their egoistic concerns.
Emile Durkheim, the sociologist, thinks that man cannot really avoid religion which reinforces the basic commitments in a society. But perhaps today one moves from home where there are commitments to school where there are commitments into a sort of unsocial world of higher studies, and then perhaps to a rather narrow corporate world with its own ideology. So, perhaps, our adult life is marked with a relative ‘anomie’, a term derived from Greek, which Durkheim used to describe the individual sense of isolation which can drive a person to despair. What perhaps is happening is that corporate ideologies are taking over from religions and providing a somewhat limited meaning to human life, for so long as a person remains with the corporation. This looks like a sort of breakdown of wider society and therewith of religion.
If religion is so utterly related to society the problem of religious differences becomes problematic, for they would appear to indicate so many different societies living in the same terrain. Today the solution might be thought to have a sheerly secular state. What is required of members is spelt out by the dogmas of political correctness. There are realities to be dealt with and values to be espoused but they are consistently this worldly. The Archbishop of Canterbury recently declared that it would not be the end of the world if the Anglican Church were disestablished. It might though be the end of England or Britain feeling that it was a Christian country.
As the world one lives in gets broader, the religion that can express everything needs to get more catholic. Different elements need to enter the admix. I gather that when Vikings became Christian they still said prayers to Thor when they went to sea. In the course of time those prayers would need to be picked up and rewritten with theological orthodoxy. The old prayers were meeting an exigency of the human spirit, the danger of the sea, the need for protection. This exigency still needs to be met, so long as men go to sea in small boats. Similarly there may be ‘Anglican’ expressions of faith which would need incorporating in a wider unity. It is up to the Anglicans to express what they are. Similarly though there might be English Catholic insights of importance for the wider Church, perhaps the interdependence of laity and clergy.
As one recognises the power of historical consciousness I find myself fearful that values around the sanctity of life get eroded. We already see this with modern, mass destructive warfare, with abortion and in certain old Christian countries, Euthanasia. This could then be extended to certain undesirable types. Contraception and indeed permissiveness are related. If one is referring here to the ‘de-ontological Natural Law’ does one in fact recognise this law and that it is binding without also recognising God? If the whole of reality is just made up of bodies, from sub atomic particles through billiard balls to man – the corpuscular idea – then would there be any reason to recognise the disorder of homosexual acts? True heterosexuality is the norm for having children, but if one does not want children, is there any reason beyond aesthetics for denying physical expression to homosexual affection?
I recall Bishop Grant saying that people would not recognise the wrongness of abortion unless they were converted to God. I suspect that this is true of the de-ontological natural law in toto. Also it is helpful to notice that we don’t arrive in the world with a de-ontological theory: rather we are dealing here with a true theory which is historically conditioned. So it was Salamanca in the sixteenth century which gave us the now neglected rules about the ‘just war’.
Recognising ‘de-ontological values’ is a matter of recognising that God’s will is expressed in his marvellous design. Some churches have slipped here when it comes to contraception, so the matter needs to be more clearly put. It is important to note too that not all values are deontological, for some are revealed, the necessity of baptism for example or the indissolubility and sacramentality of marriage between Christians.
If Durkheim is right and religion is the cement of order in society then it would seem that where there is a very strong business culture there needs too to be a very strong religious culture. I recall Alsace, full of churches and palaces where Popes came from. Despite this history, the Church is relatively moribund compared with the business culture around the vines. I took a businessman out to lunch – he was a good Catholic, but had several colleagues around - so when I said grace I got the impression he was embarrassed.

Economic Supplement 9:

2009-02-02T10:31:00.000-08:00

Throwing Money at the Problem

I see that the printing of money which is in no way borrowed is seen as a solution to the slump.
After all is that not what banks do when they create credit? They have so much money, all of which is owed to someone, and so stable are the deposits that they can lend some of the money to a new business setting up, or a business expanding, or a new public works. (They can of course lend money to financial booms in houses or the stock market).
What happens if their investment fails? They have a gap in their books. They owe £x to depositors, and they possess £x-y, where £y is what they lent to the businessman. What if the businessman doubles his money? The bank then has assets of £x-y+2y, or £x+y. Because of creative risk taking the bank has increased not just the money in the economy but the total of enterprises by the successful enterprise the money has financed. The flow of money and goods has increased and with that real achievement, there has been an increase in the quantity of money.
I have suggested that the gold standard we need in bankers is not to finance purely speculative movements, but rather real enterprises with a real chance of success.
There is talk of ‘nationalising’ banks which I hope will be impossible because of the global context of banking, but one can see how a nationalised bank would be operating under political pressure, national and local, and therefore not free to apply a detached economic yardstick. Everyone suffers if new, more efficient industries fail to find finance. The credit crunch came about in some measure because banks came under pressure to lend to certain categories of persons. If banks moved out of speculative into productive loans then the great fall in house prices to perhaps a quarter of their recent levels would help most people over a lifetime to get hold of a house and be free of debt. A substantial, drastic fall in house prices is a boon to be hoped for for nearly everyone. If people have to spend far less on their mortgages they will have far more to spend on the High Street.
I noticed some people saying they would not spend more because VAT was down 2½%. True, they will not greatly notice the difference, but for every £100 spent they would have £2.50 left in their pocket – to buy a bar of chocolate or something.
I rather fear the government getting more and more obligated and paying its debts just by printing money. I don’t suppose the Germans intended a mega inflation in the 1920’s or Robert Mugabe more recently. This though at some stage is where the printing money solution leads.
The commentators fear deflation, for people will delay their purchases of some items. If the crossovers between households and firms are to grow equal so that demand can purchase possible output there probably needs to be a deflation of the order of 10 or 20%. When commentators talk about ‘a fall in the rate of inflation’ they mean continuing inflation of say 2 as opposed to 3%. The need for a fall in prices is nowhere appreciated.

The Universe Desacralised; Human Living Secularised

2009-02-02T10:30:00.000-08:00

Man makes use of symbols, words, to express the meanings and values that inform his way of life, his self understanding and his understanding of the world.
Since man is intelligent his understanding of things and the symbolism that expresses it is in development. New words enter our vocabulary – the human genome project – and empower our conduct – the motor car. To drive carefully becomes a new moral requirement. One could be too scrupulous about tyre pressures or too careless. To keep the car regularly serviced helps ensure safety. Our integrity is at stake, our authenticity, but in a secular environment.
Unless one is very technically minded the requirement ‘Drive Safely’ throws one into the hands of other people who know what they are doing, to check the brakes for example. A new ‘symbolism’, a new understanding, brings a new dimension to brotherhood, as people with complementary understanding help each other.
Lonergan has brought about a new understanding about the human subject and with that a new symbolism usually in the sense that a familiar word comes to be used in a very precise way. So ‘deliberation’ is a word known by everyone but it gets used very precisely about weighing up different courses of action.
So do we have here a further instance of secularisation owing to an advance in understanding and symbolism? I think not for Lonergan draws our attention to ‘religious experience’ as an element in our human make up, a substructural element capable of becoming superstructural.
Let me refresh our memory on this distinction between substructure and superstructure. A substructure is an element of our experience which can become understood, and the understanding can then be expressed in concepts and words and come to be valued appropriately in relation to other elements of the substructure or of the world we live in.
A good example is judgement whereby we affirm that some understanding is true. Everyone of course is making judgements all the time. For example last week I mentioned a physicist called Eddington and all of us would accept that in the early twentieth century there was a physicist called Eddington. It is a true statement, a metaphysical statement, an ontological statement. ‘Ens et verum convertuntur’. By some true statements, man ceases to live just in his animal habitat and comes to live in the real world just as it is, not just a physical world but also an historical world, and not just a physical and historical world, but a world called and blessed by God the redeemer from all evil.
Still, not all in the world judge that God is our Saviour, but I think everyone would agree that Eddington existed. The most acute philosopher in the world makes judgements about his bank balance and his current expenditure. Judgement is seen by Gadamer as the conclusion following from a more general principle. So, in Aristotelian fashion one could make a general utterance and then subsume a particular happening and make a judgement. Lonergan though would have us review everything before we come to a judgement, for by a judgement we are posing actuality, something that binds or liberates us, something which sets a context for deliberation and action. Judgement rests on experiential evidence, though in addition to the evidence of sense data, we have the evidence of conscious data.
Someone said, ‘everyone complains about their memory, but no one complains about their judgement’ for to complain about judgement is to admit a sort of madness. The madness might be reaching conclusions when the evidence is not in or it might be failing to reach conclusions when the evidence is in.
We can claim that ‘judgement’ is part of everyone’s experiential infrastructure but it is adverted to in a superstructural way by very few. Once accurately adverted to, since truth converts onto being, we have also a metaphysics of a sort, an ontology. A great deal follows upon building up an accurate superstructure with an awareness of responsibility about this key area of human being – namely that we make judgements.
Lonergan suggests that religious experience is part of our experiential infrastructure. he sees this flowing because God gives all men sufficient grace for salvation. He admits though that religious experience may in some cases vanish completely. It may clash with other elements of consciousness. In some it becomes quite central; and continuous. In this context he speaks of the purgative way, where what is contrary to religion is overcome, and the illuminative way in which ‘the significance and implications of religious commitment are more fully apprehended and understood’ (3rd Collection: 125), and the unitive way where in mortal beings can be seen the fruits of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness and self control.
Religious experience, if it is like other elements of consciousness, may be a feeling which is a cause of dismay or disorientation. Client centred therapy following Karl Rogers would help by naming the feeling, relating it to life and other feelings, understanding its occasions and significance. Such a therapy is surely working towards the building up of a suitable superstructure.
Karen Horney has several thoughts operative at the same time including repressed thoughts which the person knows about. One wonders whether the repression of the thought of God gives energy to the keenness of the atheists. Wilhelm Stekel has several thoughts in a polyphony which crowds out certain thoughts. I wonder if what makes for the dominance of a thought is not only its intelligible content but also feeling? Feeling is a major component in certain apprehensions, for example the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. Maslow writes about Peak Experiences. There may be a strong religious component here as in a wedding service.
Lonergan discusses these psychologists in his chapter on religious experience, so one may presume he thinks they may be helpful. It is strange to reflect that we may have areas of ‘thought’ which we do not think about, so that they lack the appropriate ‘superstructure’.
In Method in Theology, without using the term superstructure he suggests that the appropriate structure is ‘faith’. ‘Faith is further knowledge when the love is God’s love flooding our hearts’ (Method: 115). A faculty psychology, dealing with intellect (truth) and will (love) confines love to what is known. ‘What the eye does not see the heart can’t grieve over’. Following a faculty psychology then the path to God is first faith, believing his revelation, and then love. So we work away, practising our faith, and if we are very diligent God might give us a hint of his love. Such mystic experience must be rare, so while we praise the saints, it would seem somewhat boastful to claim any personal knowledge or experience of what they were on about.
Lonergan replaced faculty psychology (sense experience, intellect, will) with intentionality analysis, which he later described as cognitional theory, and later as a form of phenomenology. This was not a deliberate ploy or an attempt to be clever or awkward. He found as he wrote Insight, that he was doing intentionality analysis. As he went on, he found that man’s life of love was so important that, as with sense experience, it was a source of intelligibility. He quotes with approval Pascal: ‘the heart has its reasons which reason does not know’. The reasons of the heart he calls values, or since right reason can give rise to values (vital, social, cultural, personal) he speaks of a transvaluation of values in the light of love. One is reminded of the phrase ‘post conventional morality’ when one hears of a transvaluation of values. So in Our Lord’s day conventional religious values would attend to the Sabbath in a strict way.
So attending to the data of consciousness in a phenomenological way one finds sense data, schematic images, duties and so forth and then one comes across this area of love which deals with family and mankind as well as God, and this area is so significant that it is a further ground for judgement, deliberation and decision.
The world religions witness to this area in the mythological ages where time and space were dominated by collective religious ideas. So Ayer’s Cliff was a sort of omphalos. So you get religious traditions and leaders and follies. Alongside Pope John XXIII’s teaching that the Church is always in need of reform one might posit that ‘all religious traditions are in need of reform’. The devoted and cruel suicide bomber reminds us how great that reform may need to be, but to be persuasive that reform will normally need to come from the tradition itself.
The daring suggestion, always tentative I think in Lonergan, is that religious experience in any tradition is from the grace of God and so an effect of the redemption wrought in Christ, that all traditions may need reform, do need reform, poses an endless historical task on man, historical in the way of understanding things past, but historical too in releasing a better future.

Economic Supplement 8

2008-12-23T03:07:00.000-08:00

Subsidiarity and the Economy

Lonergan wanted to find a solution to the slump which would come ‘from below’, from the banks and businesses, from the workers and from the consumers. He wanted to avoid placing the economy in the hands of expert economists and the State. For this reason he was opposed to John Maynard Keynes who would deal with a slump by deficit spending. He thought dependence that way would harm human welfare, reducing the actual flow of goods and services. He praised Capitalism for seeking to meet effective demand, seeking to supply what people wanted and could pay for.
In the 1940’s he saw the problem as emerging from a lack of investment. In the 1970’s he followed critics of the multinational firms, but he did not produce a major work on the matter. He urged a creative collaboration from many disciplines.
One way of solving the lack of investment problem is of course to bring about a great new investment in a needed area, and I would suggest that energy supply is exactly an area which, with old plants failing, calls for heavy investment.
I am not for various reasons suggesting nuclear energy but I believe Iceland has beyond banks some thermal conditions which would allow the supply of a deal of energy. The financing of this could be a private, should be private. The capital injected would go out in wages and stimulate demand. Properly designed our future energy requirements would be met. Something similar could be done with the Wash and the Bristol Channel.
Of course, for a global economy to recover by way of investment there would need to be similar projects everywhere.
Howsoever, let us suppose we extend the boom this way for 20 years, when it comes to an end we would face the same problem again.
In the absence of such major investment my solution to the credit crunch is tax cuts on business, no VAT, and a care to charge only a reasonable mark up.
Sitting in the Presbytery the truth is I have no clear idea of what a reasonable mark up should be. Companies will need to repair their equipment, they may need new investment. May I suggest the mark up should just cover repairs? The banks are there to create credit for vast new projects. So if the water board is making a new reservoir it should not raise the money from the customer, except when by increasing supplies it increases revenues. It is not the task of the customer to be forced to be a capitalist as well, and without the benefit which comes from taking a well judged risk.

Meanings and Values

2008-12-23T03:01:00.000-08:00

Someone was speaking about ‘Catholic values’ and I felt I might be in the realm of pious platitudes. Could one say, from a personal stance, values are dearly held commitments? So that a Catholic value would be the dearly held commitment to get myself to Mass on a Sunday, if possible, even when one is on holiday?
The valuing, the personal commitment, does not make the value. The value is valuable in its own right. I recall at university in the 1960s coming across some paper about the likely effect of a nuclear war. Whole territories would be wiped out. I found myself desolated at such a prospect, and committed if possible to find another way. I was recognising the value of human life and agreeing with the teaching of the Church which condemned the mass destruction of cities. The same value can be expressed as a principle and deeply held as a conviction, as a commitment. As an insight leads to conceptualisation, commitment may lead to expression in principles. It seems to me though that commitment may bind one without it being expressed in abstract principles. A parent might be committed to his daughter’s education without abstracting about the matter.
Values are expressed in commitments and lived. Good people are not all ethicists or moral theologians. A good person though might confront a dilemma and be helped to reach a decision by someone who has studied the matter. We meet here the idea of substructure and superstructure. One person has the substructure of a good will in operation. The expert though is able to help by having a reflective superstructure, rather as human life is lived with meanings and values by one group and thematised by historians. One concludes that though we don’t all have to be experts in morals it is helpful to all if there are some such experts around in the community in a vital and interactive way.
There needs to be ‘a teaching’ if those who are living in a substructural way, without too much analysis, are to be guided, and the ‘good will’ of the good person needs to move confidently to the advice and instruction of those who are expert. There is a submissiveness here but it is for the sake of life, excellence and achievement of some sort.
I have the sense that there needs to be some restoration of confidence in this area. I me someone recently who was talking about a person who was a good Christian as well as a Catholic, as if Catholicism was a sort of drag, contained a bias, against being a good Christian.
Fr Lonergan in his Third Collection writes about authenticity, about self transcendence and about norms belonging to attentiveness, intelligence, rationality and conduct so that we live with truth, reality and the excellence of goodness, the happiness of a clear conscience.
The values we have to recognise are not simply deontological but also, to coin a term, dehistorical. We need to recognise that we have a body which is alive and that life is always a divine gift, so we should not bump people off, ourselves or other people (deontological values). We need to recognise that we are historically conditioned and that issues have emerged which it is a duty to address, racialism for example or the way through the present ‘credit crunch’. Current permissiveness and abortion might seem to be simply ‘deontological’ issues, but the issue seems to stand with historical ideas, like the woman’s right to choose, or the way ‘a civilised society’ deals with private sexual morality or ‘human rights’. Civilised values, to be truly civilised, need the realism to recognise their deontological base.
By authenticity, Lonergan means something cumulative over time. So Newman at one stage thought he ought to be an angel and there had been a mistake, that he ought to be an evangelist, that he ought to be a Catholic (but not a Roman Catholic) and then that he ought to be a Roman Catholic. These are changes of position (should we call them ‘conversions’?) whereby he moves from thinking he is an angel entrapped in flesh to accepting that he has the down to earth dignity of a human being combined with the baptismal grace which made him a child of God. A secular example of authenticity is that of Eddington who before the First War got interested in Einstein, who during the war stayed loyal to that interest despite strong pressure against because Einstein was German, and who after the war, verified his theory at some expense. (I have seen it said that the cloud cover on the occasion of the eclipse was so great that Eddington could not have verified the theory. If so that would be inauthenticity, showing that the cumulative product can be rare.)
Authenticity issues in self transcendence. Perhaps self transcendence is not a perfect term for it rather implies that the self is left behind, whereas the point is that the life of the self requires going beyond the self but in a way which involves the self with another of some sort.
There is a problem here for we cannot avoid being the central figure in our flesh and blood experiences. The problem was solved by the Greeks in that we choose what is more excellent and we do choose what is most excellent, wisdom, by which we recognise another.
Lonergan has us oriented to self transcendence by the dreams of the morning in which, though as victims, we are in symbolic mood facing the challenge of the day and of life. He has us waking to a world of sensible stimuli, like toothpaste and cups of coffee, and I recognise here the world of animal extroversion which stays with us all the time since we are animals, set to jump if there is a big bang. As shaped up by our parents, by human history, by our personal splash we find ourselves living beyond animal extroversion in a world mediated by meaning and motivated by values.
Between the dream and consciousness symbols have the difference that they can become utterly precise and demanding. At Downside the bell rang and though still half asleep we had to get up and go through our hygienic ablutions in preparation for Holy Mass. By symbol we are oriented to action and so to the mighty stage of history. If the bell is a symbol mediating meaning and value, life thereafter included systems of symbols coming at one to be mastered, the language, mathematics, physics, chemistry, the game of rugby. In Easter and Summer terms I found relief in catching trout which I suppose was a near return to the world of animal extroversion. Nothing was ever more surprising and exciting.
Still by work and signs and examples one came to know the world one lived in and how one should conduct oneself, meanings and values. Truth to tell, meanings and disvalues as well. There was the public school world and the rest of the world and was not Downside the Eton of the Catholic Schools? About growing in wisdom there is a lot of unlearning the tradition one has received, so that coming to live in the real world is a continuous conversion helped by symbolic structures and also by other people in the richness and also the poverty of their living.
Undergirding authenticity and self transcendence Lonergan has the term normative. ‘Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible.’ There are norms at each level, so if there is cloud cover one should not pretend to astronomical observations. The norms around the precept ‘be responsible’ are different from the others, for ‘be responsible’ requires that there be options. The precept is concerned with how one should use one’s freedom. The self transcendence of knowing brings the self into knowledge of the world. How one should act though, except in extraordinary circumstances, gives one a set of options and so you get deliberation and choice. By free choice one changes the world, other people and above all ones own self.
There is a dreaming self transcendence of a sort, a sensitive self transcendence, a cognitive self transcendence and a performative self transcendence but these all occur in the context of an affective self transcendence which may be more in potency than act. Our living finds its meaning in love, at the heart of which is or is not the love of God. In a world of distractions and biases, of cares and worries, the awareness of the centrality of God’s love needs to be reflected upon, understood and assiduously cared about. You get the world of religion with morning prayer and night prayer. You get intimacy with the sacrament and sacramentality of marriage. You get a relevant loyalty with sincere and effective love of neighbour even across the sea, even in the distant future.

Economic Supplement 7

2008-12-23T03:00:00.000-08:00

Reducing VAT

The purpose of an economy is to organise work upon the potencies of nature so that goods and services may stream forth to supply man’s needs.
When there is a deal of investment going on then there is a division of resources so that some are going, not directly to produce goods and services for households (for government and people), but to provide equipment for future production or education for future services.
G.D.P., Gross Domestic Product, is a familiar term but it lumps together current output for consumption and output sold to raise productivity in the future, concrete investment. So GDP is equal to output for consumption plus output for concrete investment. If investment is high people will be consuming less. Nevertheless it will be experienced as a boom time. People are employed. Prices are high, but everyone can afford something.
In a so called slump time, since investment has fallen away, output for consumption could increase. The trouble is that at current prices, only so much output can be afforded. With unemployment rising, the welfare state is likely to get into debt preventing dire poverty.
If the government reduces VAT then it may hope that prices may fall, more will be purchased as so what it loses in VAT it may recoup by less payments for unemployment benefit. For as more ‘output for consumption’ is sold so more people will be needed to work to make these things.
It could not be done overnight, but I would like VAT to be reduced to zero and corporation tax likewise. The task of business is to produce goods and services as cheaply as possible.
It is true that, if government requires 45% of the total output for consumption then income tax will need to be, on average, 45% of income, but the need for taxation is at the heart of politics and it is a good thing if the quantities can be seen clearly. ‘No taxation without representation’ is an ancient principle.
Apart from war, there are two ways of avoiding slump. The first is a widespread fall, not in inflation but in actual prices for consumers. The other is major new investment. I guess, actually, we need major new investment in energy provision. If the electricity goes off nothing in this house works and I hade best go to bed and perhaps expire. I gather there is energy in Iceland in the way of thermal activity. If the government assisted private investment in this area I think it would be promoting the common good and considerably easing the slump.

Metaphysics

2008-12-23T02:59:00.000-08:00

One of us proposed the principle, from nothing, nothing comes as a clear point of metaphysics. It follows, of course, that since there is something, there must be God. There remains the task of proving something exists.
Lonergan says something similar about evolution, ‘It is only the cause of the whole universe that from lower species can bring about the emergence of successive higher species.’ (Third Collection, 24) I don’t know what Hawkins would make of that – the point thought would remain that to prove God’s existence this way you would have to prove the evolution of species. One recalls the teaching of Vatican One that from created things, God’s existence could be proved. It did not say it had been proved.
Such a high level of metaphysics fulfils Aristotle’s claim that we know when we now the cause. Put simply, we know when we can say ‘because’. The metaphysics that emerges would apply to any created universe. It is interesting that the Greeks so far as I know did not hold the idea of nothingness and creation very clearly. There was a tendency to think of the material order as eternal and the divine was at work helping the philosopher in his work. The idea of nothingness, creation and God comes from the faith perspective. False Gods are ‘not things’. Augustine (d. 430) is already clear. The matter is declared solemnly at the 4th Lateran Council (1215) ‘God made all things visible and invisible out of nothing’.
One realises, with a certain shock, that the ability to say ‘out of nothing, nothing comes’ could not have been said by the Jahwist theologian who composed Genesis II at the time of King Solomon. God fashioned everything. Bara, the word for creation, came from fashioning a quill pen. Our power of conception and expression is historically conditioned. We get enlightened by a genuine movement forward, Cardinal Newman’s ‘Development of Doctrine’. I think here it is helpful to recall Lonergan’s position that ideas have dates and history can be scientifically ordered. So, after the Lateran Council we find Aquinas making a clear distinction between essence and existence, things possible and things actual.
It remains that metaphysics belongs to this world as well as any possible world. Here it is more a matter of certain conclusions rather than of first principles. Such metaphysics Lonergan sees as arising from Cognitional Theory, Epistemology – and hence Metaphysics. He describes the three stages by three different questions. 1.) What do I do when I know? 2.) Why is doing that knowing? and 3.) What do I know when I do it?
He describes ‘Cognitional Theory’ as phenomenology, and so as a sort of description of what goes on, a description which is innocent of ‘epistemology’ and ‘metaphysics’, and so prepares the way all the more convincingly for these later achievements. Cognitional theory then is descriptive. All the data are given directly in consciousness. There are ‘states’ and ‘processions’, or for Thomistic ‘processions’ read ‘operations’. A state exists, but there is an incompletion about it, an emotional drive about it, which leads to an operation, and so a new state of consciousness.
Galileo, playing with his new telescope, looks at the moon and sees a pattern to each of the marks on it. Seeing is a state, seeing a pattern gives rise to a question, why are they similar? The question is an operation, it sets him thinking, where have I seen that pattern before? Thinking is not a matter of just looking but working with imagination. They could be volcanoes, they could be craters. His insight is one thing, and it is a further operation to express this insight, to put it into concepts and words. With the theory formulated, he looks through the telescope again. A further question is under way . . . does the data confirm my idea of craters? It does? Absolutely or very probably. A new conclusion is being born. Something similar happened with Archimedes as he played with a rubber duck in his bath and thought about King Hiero’s crown.
Cognitional theory thus gives states which emerge from the first state, sensation. The next state is a theory. the next state is the formulation of the theory. the next state is the assessment of the truth of the theory so formulated against the evidence which is re-examined. There are four states then, and three operations. The operations are wondering, moving to an expression and moving to a conclusion.
Cognitional theory involves personal work, thinking about ones own questions, theories and conclusions. I find humdrum things like bank accounts useful for one has a lively question! Every life moves between questions and answers. How is Freddy doing at school? Why was Mrs de Zuluetta not at church today? Cognitional theory is a matter of being able to recognise this happening again and again.
Epistemology builds upon the base of cognitional theory and asks ‘Why is doing that knowing?’ ‘Doing that’ is more than ‘taking a look’, for there is an interior build up of hypothesis, expression, conclusion, and of course, though I did not express it above, expression of conclusion. One might think knowing is really just taking a look or hearing about looks which other people have taken, for example in Australia. The world to be known is the world we see. But cognitional theory gives us things we can’t see, like the stirring in the mind of Galileo. Many philosophies, though, innocent of cognitional theory tend to the idea that knowing is just about seeing ‘the already out there now real world’.
Idealist philosophy takes the realm of theory as its object and somehow loses touch with ‘the real world’, so one can say that Kant lost the world in his sturdy. Cognitional theory though shows questions arising from the concrete and theory coming to answer questions about whatever, including the already, out there, now, real world.
When a whole lot of asteroids hit the moon, the moon did not know what was happening. the asteroids though left clues in the form of craters and so Galileo came up with a theory first, but the theory was so good that he came up with a conclusion that the theory was true. The conclusion is consciously in the mind of Galileo, but what has come to be known also lies beyond his mind. Asteroids did hit the moon in times past, and now it is also true that the fact has come to be known by the mind of man. Let us remind ourselves again, such advances have dates. If there is a metaphysics of physical facts there is also a metaphysics of meaning.
Metaphysics answers the question, ‘What do I know?’, and also of course, since each of us is very finite on history’s stage, ‘What do we know?’ Metaphysics deals with judgements which are sure and so irreversible. It may be helpful to note that in Christology, Lonergan, facing the Christ of History, Christ of Faith problem bases Christology on the claim, in New Testament document upon New Testament document, that Christ is ‘the Son of God’. From the faith of the early Church he is concerned to find a starting point which scholarship cannot overthrow. So there are various facts of history – William the Conqueror, Galileo and his telescope – which are simply known. They happened. So because of the war I do not recall meeting my father, but from countless evidences, I know he was my father. This is a more down to earth metaphysics than that which says correctly ‘out of nothing, nothing comes’.
It is true of course that much science and much history is hypothetical, so that Newton has somewhat given way to Einstein. I think though it is worth noting ‘irreversibles’, points where a true judgement has been made. So the world is much older than the Biblical account suggests. There are those who suggest that God could have created fossils etc. just to test the faith of his people. Alongside the fact that he is truthful, he shows himself on our side. I take the world of nature and its evidences as a created word of God, alongside the inspired world of God that is Sacred Scripture.
There are moments when ‘sciences’ arrive on the scene. So around 1230 Philip the Chancellor distinguished grace and nature, intellect and faith. For physics there is Newton; Chemistry, Mendeleef; Biology, Darwin; Psychology, Freud; History, Boeckh; and maybe for Economics, Lonergan, with his realisation that ‘the crossovers must equal. For philosophy too it is Lonergan who has completed the Copernican turn to the subject inadequately inaugurated by Descartes and by Kant. For Lonergan shows the subject as capable of affirmation of things human and divine and so capable of metaphysics and response to revealed religion.
Within each subject there are things which come to be known, things which are, even probabilities which are. With such affirmations man transcends himself in the sense he no longer lives simply in an animal habitat but in a universe which is known in some measure, and through history in increasing measure. Does anyone doubt Harvey’s circulation of the blood?
I think metaphysics could become a more popular term, for we are all metaphysical. There can be poor metaphysics and excellent metaphysics. the latter brings the human subject into the picture, whether it is Heraclitus pondering on conversation, the word, or Galileo looking at sunspots or Lonergan helping man to raise to something understood the operations and states we all experience but usually fail to bother to notice or understand.

Economic Supplement 6

2008-12-03T12:10:00.000-08:00

An Advantage of the Credit Crunch

Until just recently it was possible to go down from Baliol or some such place, take a seat behind a computer, follow an elementary mathematical intelligence and go home with £300,000 a year and the prospect of bonuses. The life-style that emerged required continuing lavish support so the person was trapped. Hubris lead to nemesis. There are counsellors to help those who find life meaningless because they have achieved all their ambitions. The counsellors are employed of course to keep the poor saps working.
The credit crunch will mean it is not so easy to find a job and so one has to think about the matter. To be a slave of course is not to have a choice and the need for a wage for many has meant working down the mines or in the fields for a pittance.
Lonergan describes work in the economy as that by which man raises the potencies of nature to a standard of living, a flow of goods and services for households.
By work other things are done, households are made into homes, religious services are provided. Work has not only the potencies of nature to work upon but also, as it were, the potencies of grace.
A great theologian would point out that grace is always in act and the potencies are in the human side. There are though those created graces alongside supernatural graces. There is the humanity of the missionary. I love the story of the nun in near despair about Aids in Africa, who asked the children why they still believed in God after their parents had been taken from them. They replied, ‘Then God sent you to us.’ Her vocation was considerably strengthened.
W.S. Jevons humorously described religion as the ultimate trade in invisibles, but I think, though there is obviously an economic aspect, for churches must be built, it is good to recognise in the Church a motivation which is not economic, ‘a vocation’.
We pray ‘Send forth your Spirit and the face of the world will be renewed.’ We can see in the world’s troubles failures lay and clerical, so that hearts have failed to entwine, as Daniel O’Connell put it. May the credit crunch lead to much more ‘thinking things through’ so that there may be a greater flow of divine ‘services and goods’.
More prosaically we should work to encourage the young about their options. I have been talking to a 15 year old whose vocational aspiration is to be a hairdresser. Now I have nothing against hairdressers if they manage to tidy me up and leave my locks almost as flowing as when I went in. They deserve a tip. My psychology retains equipoise. It is important work they do. When though I suggested the young lady might be a nurse, she was taken by the idea, but explained she could never get the qualifications needed. I asked a senior parishioner, a nurse, what these might be. She said maths (so you could give correct dosages) and biology (so you had some idea of what was going on). So I have urged the young lady to attend to maths and biology. Could anything be better than a good nurse as you face vital problems?
I notice that qualifications have entered upon the scenario of religious life. Everyone must have A Levels to be a nun. Such religious orders may be missing out on a richer future.

The Polyphony of Consciousness

2008-12-03T12:09:00.000-08:00

Religious experience is a normal part of the polyphony of consciousness, even though it is not a natural but a supernatural element.
Mounier said man is naturally artificial. One could echo that by saying man is normally religious. So, little children from any background can be helped to pray. It is also true of course that in a very secular culture the average person may have repressed the religious element in life, a repression they could be brought to talk about, something they ‘register’.
Religious consciousness is an element of conscious experience which along with other experiences forms the substructure of our human being. Substructural elements can give rise to a superstructure where what is experienced is also named and placed in the horizon of what a person knows, in the sense of being able to talk about the matter. So one first experiences and then comes to name the colour blue.
If one can talk about something there can be development in the way of understanding and intentionality. To describe something as substructural is not to disparage it. In the religious experience there is direct access to God who is love, and there is no more important reality for man.
It is through the power of naming things and through discourse, through the word in that sense, that we can consider things, draw on our human traditions, criticise our personal conduct, and declare the truth. ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one God’ is a declaration in language calling everyone to reassess their priorities. It is through such words at the level of superstructure at the level of culture that people learn they should be converted. Something they have been neglecting, something they have forgotten about, something even they have repressed belongs to them in a sense, and is what is most important.
Lonergan uses the word luminous, light bearing, and I think we can take it that he is referring to something within consciousness itself. At a substructural level there are many elements. I am aware that it is a wet day and conscious that my options are thereby limited. I am aware of a pile of papers and conscious that I have things I must deal with. I am aware of divine office to be said and conscious I must fit it in before the end of the day. I am aware that my diary is free and conscious perhaps of a slight disappointment that the wide world does not need me today. I am using ‘awareness’ and ‘consciousness’ as a sort of duo. My being is being in the world and of that I am aware as a starter. From that my consciousness takes shape. Lonergan has being aware that the window is open and being conscious that I am about to sneeze. Consciousness is the interior state. This is the inner room where I may enter and realise that beyond windows open, beyond piles of paper, beyond the state of the weather, God is present and God is all.
I am playing around with the terms awareness and consciousness, for our being is being in the world of which we are aware and our consciousness has the power to shift us to new realms of conscious awareness. Our conscious awareness is not only of the already out there now but it can become of the already out there now then. Lonergan has made us conscious and aware of the transforming power a question can have upon consciousness and how through memory, through attention to new data, how through the formation of schematic images insights may arise which intimate the possibility of a new grasp on reality. Our movement forward is not merely contemplative.
Contemplation though is truly luminous in that our consciousness becomes aware of reality in the light of understanding. So great an achievement is this that for centuries this was conceived as the goal and so the luminousness sought was the mind in possession of the truth which lay beyond it and in that light, going beyond all creatures, one could and one can find God in the cloud of unknowing. From such awareness came the vast achievement of monastic life, from say 450AD to 1450AD.
Of course to achieve contemplative awareness requires considerable effort, and so the monks built everything around that goal, with personal silence and with readings secular and religious. Almost without realising it, the monks by their evangelisation and agriculture were changing the world.
What makes the modern world modern is the awareness that man has the power to develop things. St Ignatius of Loyola wrote, ‘When you pray, pray as if it all depends on God. When you work, work as if it all depends on you’. What makes the modern world so futile is the introduction of individualism into the scenario, so that unless we are coerced by needed wages or enticed by bonuses we do not know the secret of collaboration with others in obedience and friendship. There has been a crisis in the Congo at the time of writing. I was very proud to be able to take a second collection for the people there using the agency of CAFOD. Such a capacity though belongs to the parish precisely because it is got together.
Luminosity belongs not just to contemplation but to constructive action. Action can be carried out and seen by others. It involves a certain self forgetting and the finding of a new self. The letting go of self forgetting can help one overcome bad habits.
The priest or extraordinary minister who takes the Blessed Sacrament to the sick tries to recollect what he or she is doing. Action though is demanding of our whole attention. So St Ignatius said, ‘when you work, work as if it all depends on you’. We need though to bring love to our work or it will be loveless. Perhaps we can reverse St Augustine’s ‘when you love look to the source of your love and you will find God’, so that we may say ‘bring the love of God into your work so that in all your encounters you show appropriate loving affection’. This perhaps is what Our Lord means when he would have us ‘dressed for action’ or when he says that not only will we be in him, but he will be in us.

Economic Supplement 5

2008-11-30T09:58:00.000-08:00

Ways of Dealing with a Slump

‘Precepts that are not technically specific turn out to be quite ineffectual’ (Christian Duquoc). It is the genius of Catholicism to have, over the centuries, wrought technically specific precepts regarding religion and also to have combined a merciful set of dispensations when the technically specific is too demanding. So there is a technically specific law that Catholics should marry Catholics. One notes that the frequency and reliability of dispensations can undermine the law.
I was wondering what might be ‘technically specific’ precepts for dealing with a slump, and I suggest one might be, ‘if possible maintain your reasonable standard of living’. I do not mean ‘go into unsupportable debt and rely on the State to maintain your reasonable standard of living’. If you can transfer your debt to the debt of the State, the world is getting more heavily into debt.’
What I am trying to express is that if consumer demand is the engine of the economy, then if you are in a position to exercise it in a reasonable way, continue to do so. The position reminds me of Bishop Grant who said – he was a founder of CAFOD – ‘Whatever you do for Lent, don’t give up chocolate – you will ruin Ghana’! It is part of my life to go across to the Chinese restaurant which is struggling. I could imagine, because there is a slump, it would be a virtue to cook for my guests. But, if I have the finances, by going across to the Chinese I am helping them to survive. This in a humble way is an instance of ‘Le Bon Sens’, the sense of the Common Good, ‘Common Sense’ in an uncommon degree, ‘collective responsibility’.
On the radio, the correspondent found hermself the only guest in a 5 star hotel in Pakistan. The staff were so delighted, they ran around her. They hoped, against bazookas falling, that guests would return. May it be. Sic. Amen

The Scale of Value and Human Intentionality

2008-11-30T09:57:00.000-08:00

The scale of values is an ascending theme as notes on a piano – so there are values vital, social, cultural, personal and religious – but the structure achieved in a mature and holy person rests on the lowest level, on vital values, for as human beings we need to be alive for starters.
The scale of values as expounded by Lonergan and Doran is intimately connected to the scale of intentional consciousness as expounded by Lonergan. So we have sense experience, and alongside the data of sense, the data of consciousness. Correspondingly there is the level of vital values, such as the excellence of a cup of coffee, or, in the desert, a glass of water. Vital values include conscious spontaneity towards others and so perhaps a primordial sense of human unity, for as Pope Paul VI taught ‘God made man to be brothers not enemies’. There can be disorder in our spontaneity, dramatic bias, and the recognition that the censor can be worked upon to be constructive rather than repressive in Doran’s ‘psychological conversion’. Vital values include also the wider ecology, for example, problems arising from sun-spots, CO2 emissions and climate change or a disease affecting the world bee population which is essential for fertilising crops. Health problems have to do with vital values. Starvation, floods, earthquakes have to do with vital values.
One can see that vital values in their entirety compose a colossal agenda, with the health of the world on one side and the health of man including his basic psychic health on the other. As an agenda though, human intentionality must get involved. We witness other levels of value. For example it may be out of religious values that some people busy themselves heroically helping lepers.
One might suggest that higher levels of value, as they emerge, have nothing to do but sort out disorders at the vital level. Where disorder is as it were disorder made visible then the good works can be seen and all will praise the Father in Heaven. As we ascend the scale of values we find ‘disvalues’, disorder at a higher level, so here too good works are to be done. Indeed it is at the highest level of religious values that we find the disorder which is sin. It remains true though that disorders at the natural level of vital values show up human failure at the higher levels.
Ascending from vital values are social values. Social values move from inter-subjective organisation in families and friendships to rationally (or irrationally) organised entities whereby man’s capacity to transform the potencies of nature into a standard of living is organised. This level of operation corresponds to man’s intelligence rather than his rationality, to the understanding which believes what it is taught rather than to the level which asks ‘is it so?’ We learn by trusting others. So in our present society some people believe you ought to get married and some people believe marriage is only an unnecessary bit of paper.
As growing up and maturing in a society we trust others in learning a language, in learning to read, in learning what is good conduct and what is not, and on the whole we can make our way and even pass exams without asking deeper questions. We have to learn that the term ‘water’ applies to that wet stuff. We do not ask ‘why’ we use the term ‘water’, or why there are 26 letters in the alphabet. We accept the truths we are taught or how shall we get started? The social world I am presenting is full of affirmations and intelligibilities – you need petrol for the car – and the affirmations are based on unquestioning trust. Because our ancestors got it right we may hope to get it right. Of course at this level of simply operating intelligence you deal with cultural, personal and religious values. One goes to church with everyone else perhaps but does not think about the matter too much. As I am describing the level of social meanings and values, I think one can recognise Cardinal Newman’s ‘notional assent.’
The society we belong to has the task of seeing that vital values are somehow attended to for all and that the ecology is reasonably cared for. The society though may be biased in some way so that for example slaves don’t matter. The society is guided by higher values and disvalues, religious, personal and cultural.
Cultural values correspond with the level of consciousness described by Lonergan as ‘rational’. This level of consciousness belonged to Aquinas who described it in terms of ‘possible intellect’. Aquinas in turn was influenced by Augustine who recognised that our task was to recognise the truth. At the Council of Nicaea it was not claimed you could imagine the Son as equal to the Father as Tertullian tried to do and failed; or that you could understand the matter perfectly, as Origen might have tried to think; rather the matter was declared to be true, and to deny it merited an anathema. With divine matters we are saying Amen and then, with St Anselm and with Vatican One seeking deeper understanding reverently, diligently and piously. Rational consciousness though recognises the truth of other matters which are proportionate to the human intellect.
The matter is really important because philosophers have not understood the matter. So Lonergan could write ‘There is no modern philosopher who could say Amen’. If the Church were to attempt to base herself on such modern philosophy the faith would be disastrously undermined, for our faithful assents depend upon natural assents. Do we not see the result in a widespread way in current lapsation?
I will give two examples. In both cases, to make a judgement depends on evidence, but for some sorts of judgements the evidence may be very simple. I get a bank statement. The account seems low. The incomes are there, but what is this expenditure for £450? Of course, I had my car serviced and repaired. I accept the bank statement as true.
The President of the Royal College for Science declares that the world is warming because of CO2 emissions. Aquinas said the argument from authority is the weakest of arguments – so, what is the evidence? Some people think the problem might be to do with sunspots. I find I am not in a position to simply assent. I might agree that as a cautionary measure certain things should be done – the Amazon allowed to grow for example – but I would be distressed at cautionary measures which removed food from the tables of the poor. I find I am not in a muddle but in a state of having questions unanswered. I do not know what the case is.
The cultural level deals with what is and what is not the case, and so informs or possibly misinforms the social level of values. So for example if at the cultural level the philosophers fail to notice that it is possible to reach a conclusion, then it will be hard to argue that people ought to get married, for that is a sort of conclusion. Weakness at the cultural level will lead to a drift at the social level. That is our situation today and if we live by notional assents alone we will be adrift with the society.
Lonergan’s fourth level has to do with deliberation and decision and it gives rise to an area for personal values. The level follows on being alive, being socialised and having some level of understanding. Personal values entail knowing when one knows and knowing when one has a question. One has to decide about oneself as well as about other people. Should I eat so much? What shall I wear? How should I develop my understanding about climate change? Do I need to work on the censor which disallows certain images and affects so that I overcome a block in myself? Personal values inform cultural values in the sense that if I know I can know and know I can decide freely then certain cultural positions cannot stand, for example, human beings should be ruled by the stick and the carrot.
Personal values show up a problem of intentionality. We do not always carry out our good resolutions. We need help ‘from above’. We genuinely look for love, to receive, to give. I think one can claim that all human cultures witness to holiness, but such witness is not problem free. Can one identify holiness with the gift of God’s love in other world religions? I think that is Lonergan’s position. Love leads to family life and I think one should add in friendship. Lonergan refers to friendship in his essay on marriage, quoting the Greeks to the effect that friendship normally requires high virtue, but in marriage so much is going for the couple that all you need is decency and then you get friendship. I guess today that we are coming to realise that a reasonable level of virtue is required for marriage. One must though recognise that marriage is a help for ordinary people and in the Catholic world a help to holiness. There is then ‘love for the community’ witnessed to by soldiers but also for all of us as we give our assent to legitimate authority.
The three loves, religious, intimate and social witness to something more than sheer rationality and intentionality about man. Where one such love is at work the others are probably there too. Lonergan at the end of his life speaks very simply of ‘affective conversion’ and of how we become a part of something greater. One recalls St Augustine’s words: ‘When you love, look to the source of your love and you will find God.’

Economic Supplement 4

2008-11-17T14:04:00.002-08:00

In the 1960’s, around the name Schumaker, there was concern for an intermediate technology to help the Third World develop. With plentiful labour forks might be better than tractors, especially as tractors need skilled repair. A slogan was ‘small is beautiful’.
At the same time, in the advanced world, the thing was ‘economies of scale’ augmented by technical progress. In those days if the battery in the car went flat you could crank it by hand. Now technical progress has made it inconceivable that the battery goes flat . . . so if it does, (when it does!) cranking is not a solution.
With modern technology most managers have the job of hoping it will work and calling on the experts if it does not. The chap working in the shop can’t do much if the credit card machine breaks down.
Lonergan sees that our technology needs to be efficient so that the world’s teeming millions are fed, but he also sees that there is a problem if our personal capacity is not developed. The Popes make the same point.
I suspect that technology around consumption again could be simplified. I recall a post war wireless which clearly indicated where you turned the dial to get the Light Service or the Third Service. To day I find myself pressing buttons in a random way and occasionally coming up with what I am looking for.
Today in the Chilterns one sees occasionally shepherdless sheep, the odd cow, a stray tractor – what one does not see is any degree of labour intensive agriculture. The fewness of farm workers makes for a lonely life I suspect. In the shops our food comes from the ends of the earth, is very wonderful (I am grateful) and costs a good deal.
I find myself wondering whether there is not scope for an intermediate technology here which involves man more in the way of labour which develops skills and adapts intelligently to problems.
I look after a small vineyard with 400 vines. There is a slow process of coming to understand the vine and the branches – grapes never grow from the main stem. There is the challenge of not using insecticide but keeping the vineyard clear of weeds – a challenge which meets my declining energy levels. There is, occasionally, the undeserved excellence of a good bottle of wine. I am developing and at times failing adequately to develop an intermediate technology. I find there is nothing I do, beyond disturbing about one mouse’s nest a year, that disrupts the ecology. I am free to combine prayer with labour. The task of regular physical labour is a matter of personal discipline and also, I think, understanding oneself.
In vineyards and in moving to intermediate technology – festina lente!

Commitment

2008-11-17T14:04:00.001-08:00

While no one wishes to be a drifter most of the troubles in the world come from people who are committed, but there is something wrong with their commitment. There are those who make a fortune but lack honesty, those who advance in politics but lack humanity. There are norms which are disregarded or only partially regarded – attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, responsibility – and authenticity is demanding for it is a cumulative product. A block of some sort, a bias provides an emerging problem which is consistently ignored.
A community is defined not so much by a boundary as by a common consent to a common policy. So Lonergan having explored individual authenticity explores how this can be widened to understand community. A community requires a common field of experience or people get out of touch. The common field of experience is not just looking at the same landscape with its sunrise and sunset, or all looking at a hole in the road. It includes too the products that previous intelligence has formed which stock the libraries and the internet. It means access to the achievements of the past as well as the instrumentality for contemporary communication. Without education a new generation is like a barbarian host invading.
A community is marked by common and complimentary ways of understanding people and things. A community depends on a common sense to understand the same language or to understand the problems it faces. The plumber has a complimentary and needed understanding but I think one can recognise in the term ‘complimentary’ also those differentiations of consciousness that have arisen through the use of intelligence in the course of history, the theological (the scholastic achievement), the scientific, meaning the empirical sciences in their on-going achievement, the historical, with its reconstruction of the achievement of the human spirit in the way of meanings and values and the modern philosophical differentiation of consciousness.
Plato, horrified that the Polis could have put to death Socrates, thought the solution was a philosopher king. Meantime the Academy was a refuge for virtue. In the idea that community needs complimentary understanding one gains anew the vital importance of philosophy to help such understanding to operate in humble mode with regard to ‘the community’.
This applies to theologians of course. There is the humorous remark to the effect that one can negotiate with a terrorist but not a liturgist. There is though the Reformation which certainly divided the community of Europe and which could be seen as a reaction to the expertise of scholasticism with regard to things natural and divine. There seemed no room for new questions. Communication of discovery got reduced to authoritative utterances from on high. There was a crude protest.
The scientific world with Galileo and Newton and, it was thought, the discovery of the mathematical rules which governed material movement, has created and is creating a new sort of divsion in society between those who are guided by natural and religious values and those who are guided by natural values alone. We face anew abortion, euthanasia, and logically the systematic destruction of the unfit. I realise I have a chance of martyrdom.
The historical differentiation of consciousness which gives us a far greater access to the past has led, is leading, will lead to a new ground of atheism and division under that clam that everything produced by man is human, and since it is human it cannot be divine. The inspiration of the Scriptures, the divine guidance of the Church, though they can be recognised as beliefs affecting and explaining conduct must be dismissed. History must not only be value free but obviously free from influence from God. I merely counter with the wise words of Bishop Grant of Northampton: ‘Where the divine meets the human you get mystery’. An assertion without reason can be met by an assertion.
In the making of community where there is meeting of complementary and common understandings the task of philosophy is huge and vital. Following Vatican II, theology must concern itself also with communications and learn from their results. Modern science must move forward but realise its method does not deal with God. Modern history cannot fail to deal with beliefs in God but can shift from being ‘value free’ to being simply objective about such beliefs. They are operative and account for conduct foul and fair. Lonergan presents the needed stance: we need ‘such self awareness, such self understanding, such self knowledge as to grasp the similarities and differences of common sense, science and history, to grasp the foundations of these three in interiority which also founds natural right, and beyond all knowledge of knowledge to give also knowledge of affectivity in its threefold manifestation of love in the family, loyalty in the community and faith in God.’ (3rd Collection, 179)
Lonergan, in discussing community, moves from common understanding to common judgements, and if we do not possess these, we live in different worlds. Lonergan writes: ‘Philosophical differences affect the very meaning of meaning. Ethical differences effect all evaluations. Religious differences affect the meaning and value of ones world.’ (3rd Collection, 156) We find ourselves living in a world where the only common ground would appear to be the Gross Domestic Product –and of course, the weather. If we are speaking of our national community there has been a slippage, from one religion to several, from several to tolerance, to an enlightenment which asserts reason and denies tradition and so religion, to the rule of interests and the triumph of the democratic interest. If it were always true that ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’ then all would be well of course. The people need to be raised up by wonderful pastoral work for such to be the case. Such a prospect, while it is far from attained, at least presents a way forward, even if initially it must be an ecumenical and multi-faith way forward. Who cannot be touched by the fact that owing to an alliance between the Catholics and Presbyterians in Northern Ireland it is not possible for Westminster to promote abortion in that province? They may dislike each other and from time to time slaughter each other but to their everlasting credit they agree on this most important point, and around it ‘they live in the same world’.
To live in the same world allows support for the same policy and a common consent, a common commitment. The basis of such common consent could be ‘the scale of values’, religious, personal, cultural, social and vital but there is a tendency to a general decline as common sense deals with problems. It is obvious for example that chaos and rioting should be prevented.
With a general decline presenting the easy option one sees why Lonergan claims that it is easier to finds a good man than a good society. If a person can overcome inauthenticity in the tradition which has nurtured him and in himself then such an achievement is an invitation to others.
There are degrees of self transcendence. There is a sensitive self transcendence in enjoying a cup of coffee. Intellectual self transcendence moves to being, to understanding and stating what is, even if, in the natural sciences, such a statement might be, ’This is the best theory we have so far’. Moral self transcendence moves to decision which affects self, others and the world around. There is then self transcendence in love, for God, for neighbour and for intimacy in friendship and family life. Such love brings engagement with the whole scale of values.
The remarkable feature of such loving engagement is that it arrests decline, not in a general sense but in a milieu which is personal and may be more. For example, there were several great monks at Downside when I know it, including such as Hubert van Zeller whose writings reached many. The monasteries were dissolved unworthily, the fact is recorded. They had no mechanism to deal with excessive accumulation of land. Nothing though can deny that today, with wise and faithful monks, the tradition is as alive as it can be. The hermeneutic of retrieval follows the hermeneutic of suspicion, and the achievement belongs to greater matters, even unto the Paschal Mystery.
We find in spiritual matters the story is one of achievement, decline, redemption through authentic self transcendence. Redemption does not take us back to the same starting point but a new starting point maybe surrounded by the consequences of decline, and therefore with new creative and healing work to be done. The fields have been blown by the storms of history but they are still white for the harvest. The temple can never equate in glory to the physical structure put up by Solomon but is one thereby impoverished to have the stone rejected by the builders which is the cornerstone of something much more marvellous and reaching to the ends of the earth?

Economic Supplement 3

2008-11-17T14:02:00.000-08:00

Households

If there is a slump, even as the wishful thinkers would have it, a mini-slump, a recession, the problem in the economy is not a failure in the capacity to supply but a failure in the capacity to demand. It is not that the oil wells have run dry or ship makers are over extended or that General Motors can’t produce any more cars, but rather that the Joneses have decided not to take a holiday this year and the Smiths have stopped eating out. There is a shortage of cash about the person. It is not that Mr Average is losing his house but that, forced by payments made, forced by income levels the careless ésprit is lost. It is not that everyone has become a saver but everyone is seeking to balance the books.
It is important to realise that decisions to restrain consumption are not irrational. They are born from experience. The Jones went to Euroland last year and discovered how expensive everything is. They got a little into debt, but nothing too serious. Now they would like to get a little out of debt. Keynes, who made a bob or two on the Stock Exchange for King’s College, Cambridge used an unfortunate phrase to describe economic motivation: ‘animal spirits’, as if one was dealing with a mass of lemmings. Lonergan proposed rather that people’s past experience gave them grounds for some sort of rational decision. If a share has been going down for a couple of years, this might be time to get out. We read about ‘panic’ in the stock market. Fortunes have nearly halved. But actually most of the stocks being held are being held with the prospect of gain.
Again, one might imagine it is irrational for banks not to lend to each other. From lending to each other they have had bad experiences. Why not let them not lend, if that is what their experience bids? Why pump money into the system so they do lend? It will surely happen that some will see they have some money lying idle overnight, and there is a reliable way of earning a % point by 10 a.m. tomorrow.
If the basic problem in the economy is household demand, then the basic problem is that prices are too high. VAT could be eliminated across Europe. Business tax could be eliminated. People could be taught the nature of the problem: prices need to be reduced, so that households on their incomes can buy.
For Lonergan, the theoretical point is that ‘the crossovers must equal’. If money is raised somehow and pumped into the system all systems might go for a day or two or a year or two, but the disequilibrium will manifest itself again. Policy makers might be proud of their decisiveness and the immediate success of what they have done.
What is to be desired is a situation which allows recurrence. The financial flow to companies is sufficient to keep everyone working. Financial flows to the households (including the finite States) are sufficient to allow next year to be as good as this. If there has been technical progress there might even be an increase in standards.

Love, Commitment, Values

2008-11-17T13:59:00.000-08:00

The scale of values moves from vital to social to cultural to personal to religious. Everything depends on vital values. More particularly, each level of values takes direction from the next higher level and depends immediately on the lower level; so social values are informed by cultural values and dependent on vital values.
Personal values then are informed by religious values and dependent on cultural values. If the culture is simply pragmatic and hedonistic basing itself on the already out there now real world given us by scientific discovery, then personal and religious values can hardly emerge. What one is and what one is to be is already told to one by a set of experts and their conclusions.
Without genuine personal values religious values cannot emerge, so it is helpful to recognise the danger to man posed by a sheerly scientific culture which guides politics and the mass media and leads to sex education for five year olds. I always think the best sex education for five year olds involves couples who fall in love and ‘live happily ever after’!
The situation is poor not only for five year olds but for Man and the Church in her post Vatican Two stance where she relies on modern culture. The question, how the culture is to be upgraded is therefore of great importance.
If we envisage the solution as arising from the scientific world, the way forward is to point out that the scientific spirit itself as exemplified by Galileo, Newton and countless others is not simply a matter of observations and experiments but a matter of curiosity driving the one who makes the observations and conducts the experiments. Here is something of importance which needs to be explained and which cannot be explained and explored by scientific method.
We have, in moving to the question about curiosity moved into the level of personal values and conscious states which involve more than curiosity alone. I recall a man going in for an operation who said ‘I realise I am a bundle of atoms and yet I still feel anxious.’ Alongside being curious about curiosity we can be curious about ‘anxiety’. We are moving into a world which, as well as being aware of the data of sense brought to a high point in observation and experiment, is also aware of the data of consciousness.
One person cannot be conscious for another and so coming to apprehend and understand the data of consciousness has to be an individual, personal affair, but books can be written and persons can become expert to help others. So, alongside scientific achievement, the achievements of ‘self appropriation’ can get themselves published and so enter the level of cultural values. So one can be greatly helped by purchasing Lonergan’s Third Collection and reading it. Just as the scientist or historian belongs to a community of others who are similarly minded, so there is a widespread community of those who are concerned for spiritual values and a somewhat smaller community of those who are prepared to be absolutely accurate about what they say. Lonergan suggests we might become as familiar with the attainment of knowing as we are with the attainment of seeing by opening our eyes in daylight and looking.
Of course we are conscious of sensation, and it is not without sensation that we are awake. It is not without sensation that we get curious or find ourselves in a position to reach a conclusion. So the task of self appropriation does not go on outside the world we have come to know, and if that world has an expertise one has the advantage of being able to refer to that. We are each though the expert in our own life with its achievements and follies, with communications and breakdowns, with loves and maybe hatreds, with its religious moments or maybe moment when God is quite out of the picture or we act to keep him out of the picture. Self appropriation is concerned with how we bring ourselves to bear on the world we gradually come to know and love, in which we decide and act.
When we consider the data of consciousness abstracted from the data of experience we are therefore being highly abstract. There are two streams in the data of consciousness to be distinguished, or let us be bold and say three. The three are emotions, images and intentionality. Emotions and images proceed from the psyche and at first play a subordinate role. Without emotion we would not be stirred to understand something or delighted when we succeeded. Our actions very often proceed from the emotion of sympathy or fellow feeling. We need the work of imagination to form the schematic image needed for understanding or to prepare a course of action. The psyche then, a source of images and emotions, escorts our intentionality. But at the highest level, the level of love, our emotions appear to take over, so that we have a new basis for intentionality, a new basis for our evaluations.
Intentionality – consciousness moving with a purpose – achieves self transcendence in coming to know. Knowledge is not a matter of looking beyond oneself but a matter of constructing within oneself that which corresponds with what is, whether what one comes to know lies beyond oneself or is part of ones own make up. The idea of self appropriation is in large part the idea that we can come to understand and understand correctly what has long been part of our experience. There is self transcendence in coming to know about oneself because in understanding human nature you also come to understand about others. They too have insights, they too reach firm conclusions.
Lonergan writes (2nd Collection, 1968, p.80) that human consciousness at its fullest emerges when ‘we deliberate, evaluate, decide, act . . . Then the existential subject exists and his character, his personal essence is at stake’. This is the place of merit or sin, where we may win the peace of a clear conscience or the disquiet of guilt. Decisions face the question, is our action worthwhile? They may be purely personal or arrived at together, when hearts entwine and a common action is agreed. A common policy can win the assent of others. I think we can see there is self transcendence in well thought out and well deliberated action, for such action affects the world around, other people, and shapes anew ones own character.
These words were penned about 1968 and it was about then that Lonergan started writing about the central importance of love. In 1977 (3rd Collection, p.174) he writes about questions for intelligibility, questions for factual truth, the question of the good, and then suggests that these questions moving to answers are ‘but aspects of a deeper and more comprehensive principle. . . that begins before consciousness, unfolds through sensitivity, intelligence, rational reflection, responsible deliberation. . . a dynamic state that sublates all that goes before, a principle of movement at once purgative and illuminative and a principle of rest in which union is fulfilled.’. He is writing of love by which we are ‘lifted above ourselves and carried along as parts within an ever more intimate yet ever more liberating dynamic whole’.
The fact that this movement ‘starts before consciousness’ indicates that it is our whole nature that is involved and so why it is that our emotional life is so thoroughly involved.
When he writes that love makes us ‘parts’ helps us realise the importance of ‘commitment’, of being willing to play our part, and throughout a whole future informed by love.
At the level of rationality we are able to place values in a hierarchy, but love makes certain values operative in a new way so one can write of a transvaluation of values. Hence we find celibacy, perpetual virginity, and a new context for reflection about contraception.
Love in the family and in the community witness to the love of God. ‘When you love look to the source of your love and you will find God’. (Augustine)
The person in self appropriation has to appropriate his own physical nature with its neural basis for psychic life, his sensitivity, his intelligence, his rational capacity to reach true conclusions, his responsibility for the use of freedom all in the context of the commitment that love has brought about, the demand that love makes.
When the love of God is acknowledged then the purification which is moral conversion gets under way and intellectual conversion at least makes a start for what is invisible is acknowledged as real. The orientation to love being prior to consciousness means that loving commitment is not just a matter of mind, or even mind and heart – flesh and blood too must be completely engaged.

Economic Supplement 2

2008-11-14T08:38:00.001-08:00

Cause of the Slump

In the 1940’s Lonergan, after reading Schumpeter, came to an understanding of the trade cycle which he expressed in two works which are almost impossible to read. His philosophy helped him to identify the purpose of the economy – purchase of goods and services by the consumer. To help analysis I think it is I who have added in the government too as a household of households and also as a consumer. This helps one to the healthy realisation that States too are finite entities, whereas I grew up in a post-war world where it seemed to many the solution of every problem lay with the State.
The economy is an immense worldwide collaboration upon the potentialities of nature to bring about a flow of goods and services which are destined to be purchased. By work man transforms things and gets paid. The money he earns enables him to buy the products of the economy. When he buys, the finance he has earned flows back into the firms, so that they can continue paying workers and others.
There is then a circulation of finance, money coming from households and States to purchase goods and services, and money going from firms to pay or reward or obey households – wages, rents, dividends, taxes.
Lonergan’s main assertion is that ‘the crossovers must equal’. If prices are too high households maintaining their standard of living will go into debt. Via the banking system, firms will be able to supply the cash banks need to lend to households. Such a condition is incapable of recurrence year on year as interest payments mount up.
To illustrate the point I am going to put two situations, one entirely imaginable, one too vast for our imagination, yet understandable.
Henry Ford was asked why he paid his workers so well. He replied, if I don’t, how can they buy my cars? It is a joke of course, but it shows awareness that wages must be sufficient for output to be purchased.
Let us now consider the global economy, all the earners and their households, and the financial flow, as if it were one currency, going to those households. Include all the States as households. That financial flow conditions the possible debt free flow of households to firms in the purchase of goods and services. Here too, the financial crossovers must equal. There must be then a normative mark up on goods and services or the resultant price level will be too high.
In a free world economy what must guide the norms other than informed consciences of producers, who understand that they must cover their costs including costs to repair equipment? If they charge too high a price they are effectively making themselves thieves. They are ruining households and perhaps ruining their own market in the process. The concern for the outcome, the concern for the common good, le bon sens belongs to all participants in the economy.
In boom times, basic commodity prices rise in the markets. Such prices are not fixed by mark ups. The % mark up though will yield a greater return per item. When basic prices fall the amount raised by the same % mark up will fall per item. Revenues though will hold up if sales increase sufficiently. This should be the object of policy and hope in times of recession and slump.

Horizontal and Vertical Finality

2008-11-14T08:36:00.000-08:00

A person living deep inside a tower block might think that everything was a matter of horizontal movement, not realising that great height made part of his position. So age upon age has gone into our making but we might imagine history simply goes back to the Second World War. We are made up from subatomic particles but it might seem that we are simply made up from limbs and organs.
In the world as it is, a horizontal movement has a vertical component, rather as a line has a certain thickness. The vertical component can then lead to new horizontal operations.
It was in thinking about marriage in the 1940s that Lonergan distinguished three horizontal levels which one might describe as the affective, the rational and the holy, together with two vertical finalities.
The basis of marriage is the natural affection which leads to union and offspring. It is this level that distinguishes marriage from any other relationship.
Since man must eat, marriage provides a higher level of operation whereby a living is made and so the children grow up learning from their parents.
In marriage the love is so deep that it tells of God, and so the union leads to the couple helping each other in holy ways and helping the children also to be children of God.
In the case of marriage the higher levels, if they are not wisely informed, can do harm to the foundational level. So the Albigensians were full of the idea of God but, while they may have admitted the idea of a holy friendship, they disdained matter and so the level of attraction, union and offspring.
At the level of rational cooperation, the basic level may be disdained because it presents inconveniences (like babies!) and is so much less important that money careers, social status, insurance, a swimming pool and a privileged education maybe. The basic level, not understood as a gift from God, gets hammered and gradually the idea of marriage gets lost as the purposes of union (to foster faithful love and to have offspring) get lost. Thus our world moves towards serial monogamy, it seems. It should be recalled that a gift from God involves responsibilities to him.
The idea of vertical finality emerging from horizontal finality gave rise to Lonergan’s idea of emergent probability as a cosmological theory. Many acts of love and many responsibilities borne gives rise in marriage to a holy state of love and willingness, so many subatomic particles give rise to the periodic table of Mendeleev.
The emergence of a new order is not predictable from its basic elements and so involves God and his plans. So the many stars emerge and in that multitude the earth arrives circling the sun. It becomes a place of rain, river and sea; a place of rock and sand, the basis for the emergence of life.
Vertical finality is not predictable from the preceding situation. The new form arriving witnesses the hand of God. At the same time, since there is a succession of new situations there is a ‘probability of emergence’, which provides a framework for scientific analysis which attends only to the empirical. What has become clear since the 1950’s, when people realised how important habitat was for different creatures, is that evolution, emergent probability, is not just the arrival of a single new species on the scene, but the arrival of a new set of interdependent species. Ecology follows upon ecology, with strange birds capable of drawing nectar from strange plants.
The present global credit crunch perhaps illustrates the obscurity of vertical finality. While most people are hoping to return to things as they were (including their bad old ways!) the probability is that there needs to be a new emergence. There may I suppose be many false starts. From mistakes something may be learned. Interesting here is Simone Weil’s remark in the 1930’s that with the power of compound interest currencies would need to collapse from time to time.
Emergent finality can be seen in the way different sorts of question emerge from a previous level of question and answer. Grown man has a horizon shaped by his people’s history and has own. There can though be questions for intelligence. Should I buy some new shoes? Can I afford it? What are prices like now? Do I like that fashion? There are then questions for reflection. Are you sure you can afford it given that you have to repair your car? When you can be sure, there is the further question, is it the right thing to do – or would it be better to get my old shoes repaired?
Without questions for intelligence being answered, there is no matter for rational reflection, and without the firm conclusions of rational reflection there can be no deliberation.
Again in history there is a first plateau of practical achievement or the population won’t live long. There is a second plateau of cultural achievement with poetry and play, philosophy and literature, science and history, religion and morals. One learns at school and as much as one needs through life’s experiences. There is then a third plateau when man appropriates himself in the conditions of his own unfolding and development. Of course an individual can do this for himself in certain areas – so Socrates was a great thinker and a brave soldier. Perhaps though we should consider the third plateau as a stage of history conditioned by scholastic theology, the development of modern science, the refinement of historical scholarship and indeed the discernment of objective norms governing authentic subjectivity including affective, moral, intellectual and psychic conversion. Such attainment will be relatively rare, but perhaps across the globe sufficient in number to encourage each other and gradually bring needed enlightenment to the cultural superstructure.
The need for such an attainment is illustrated where the cultural superstructure gets fixated in some limited way and imposes a set of ideas on the multitude which prevent the sort of life which can and should be led. So in Marxism a set of ideas were imposed by Communist governments which disallowed freedom of thought and religion. With Nazism a natural pride in race got elevated into being a dogmatic superiority over all others. It is possible that the scientific differentiation of consciousness is leading to a world view which sees man as just an object among objects, a part of ‘the already out there now real world’ so that man’s spirituality again gets discounted. You might get the Royal College of Science coming out not against ‘Creationism’, whatever that is, but against Creation and against God. The state could imagine it was being up to date and ‘scientific’ in its obliteration of religion. Dawkins and others might approve, but the consequences would be terrible. We saw in the modernist crisis around 1900 that the historical spirit can lead in the same direction.
The third plateau as we are envisaging it is a case of vertical finality emerging from horizontal attainments ongoing in the realms of religion, science and history. It is philosophy working on these attainments and helping experts to remain humble and accurate in their declarations. It would help different experts to cooperate, for example theologians and psychologists or psychologists and sociologists. While we have some knowledge, the third plateau should keep us open and very shy of any false dogmatism. This is not to disparage true dogmas!

Economic Supplement 1

2008-11-14T08:34:00.000-08:00

Being Technically specific 1. Credit Creation

I suspect that the reason banks are not lending to each other is that they fear a run on the occasion of a loss of confidence and so they would like to have enough liquidity to meet a run. When a bank which had best be nameless refused any communication from another bank looking for $20 billion for a week – the return of a loan, the second bank went bust (Lehmans).
One gets the position of a bank with £x million in deposits and £x million in cash ready at any moment to pay any or all depositors. Such a bank would have to charge a fee for a deposit in order to pay for administration. There would be no scope for ‘bonuses’ since banking initiative would not exist, beyond perhaps opening a new branch or a change in the wallpaper.
In a static situation going from age to age one could imagine such a bank allowing overdrafts to reliable clients, whether households or firms, and so gently augmenting their income. The idea of credit creation and the reality of it belongs to banks.
This way the banks adopt the mantle of the money lender of old. Usury is condemned from ages past. The fact that the poor need loans from time to time has been recognised by the Church for nearly 700 years – also that the administration of such loans requires an administrative charge. To make provision for the poor in this way is helpful, especially if it excludes the rapacious usurer from the scene. Perhaps it was for this reason that a Pope of the nineteenth century, approached by bankers about the difference between usury and interest and the difficulty of making a concrete decision, told the bankers they were not to be troubled.
I suppose there is a difference between providing an overdraft for someone in a temporary disequilibrium arising within a stable situation and lending to those who wish to buy a house because the house prices are rising. The borrower hopes to benefit for with a rising market the change in his house price will purchase his groceries for the week. In seeking to benefit from the borrower’s acumen the banking system is at once promoting and seeking to benefit from an inflationary situation. With a certain objectivity one can say they will get what they deserve when the bubble bursts.
While credit creation is the mechanism whereby house prices have gone up so much in recent years bringing a sense of security to the elderly and providing an impossible challenge to young families who would like to be house owners, it is helpful to notice that credit creation has a vertical finality towards providing finance to support growth in the economy. Such growth may be extensive, greater numbers of people using the same technology and skill, or intensive, through technical progress an improvement in a society’s productivity. Both processes go in Great Britain at present. Here is the locus, in times of normal confidence, for banks to expand credit. If it is a time of a massive new technology being installed the bank’s operation will lead to a rise in prices until the new technology is installed – then, one hopes, to a lowering of prices.
Subsidiarity translates into professional responsibility for a profession such as bankers. Their responsibility is not to finance inflationary movements. A banker said to me his only criterion was whether an operation should make money.
So bankers should not finance booms in houses and they should not finance booms in the stock market. Except in some dire problem like unavoidable warfare they should not finance governments spending more than they raise in taxation.
Of course house boomers, speculators and governments seeking popularity with the multitude can find a way round my stricture. But if those who prove so venal are penalised by other banks they may think twice. Once the currency was protected by a gold standard. We need a new gold standard to be provided by the banking profession in its integrity. Thus the value of a currency will be preserved and genuine economic growth promoted.