The English and Philosophy

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.