Metaphysics

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.