Economic Supplement 3

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

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

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

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

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.

The World Constitutive Function of Meaning

There are different world views, and one might improve the statement by saying different operative world views. I once had a curate who as a boy used to serve Mass in a chapel outside which a Littlewoods sign hung. He formed the view that by divine Providence he was destined to win the pools. Each Saturday evening would find him still disappointed. He would be the first to agree that our operative world views do not always call upon our rational power to recognise baloney. So Fr Lonergan writes ‘the constructions of intelligence without the control of reasonableness yield not philosophy but myth, not science but magic, not astronomy but astrology, not chemistry but alchemy, not history but legend’ and I suppose one might add not religion but superstition.
If meaning operating with a rational control gives us a knowledge of empirical science and history, by the same token it gives us a knowledge of ourselves. Knowledge of the world and of the self advance pari passu.
I came across a physicist who thought there must be a load of parallel universes because the chances were against such a universe as this, showing as it were, design features. I think this theory makes the assumption that because a thing can be thought therefore it must exist. In rational reflection or judgement the truth of some theory is recognised and others are dismissed. The fact that our world shows evidence of design does not mean that therefore there must be millions of universes lacking design just as the fact of Hamlet being written does not mean there have been millions of monkeys playing with typewriters. It was William of Ockham who wrote ‘entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate’ (beings should not be multiplied without necessity).
There is a way of thinking about things which is sensible and rational. The Royal College for Science in insisting on experiment or observation is insisting on the sensible as a basis for judgements which belong to empirical science. But it is not only the world of empirical science which is sensible. The interpersonal world of human relations does not get along without senses operating on such things as smiles and letters.
The scientist operating on billions and billions of parallel universes, while he may know much about the cosmos around, would seem not to have adverted to his own power of rational judgement. The writing of Hamlet is better explained and adequately explained by accepting that William Shakespeare was a brilliant playwright. Alongside billions of atoms the scientist needs to recognise his own mind and how to use it sensibly.
After writing Insight (finished 1954, published 1957) Lonergan became aware of a distinction he had not made which is important. He had a conversation with Fr Coreth, and realised that there is a distinction between real being and notional being. One may or may not prove Pythagoras’ theorem, but the matter is notional. An apple though, manifesting itself through senses, is real. There is a sensible and a notional realm proportionate to man’s intellect. The distinction is so obvious that it is surprising that a book like Insight could be written without making it. The human intellect is like a highly charged snail. It works very thoroughly on what is within its range. It makes an advance in its horizon very slowly. Any advance is very slow for it is through not knowing to knowing, through question to answer and through question which does not have an appropriate heuristic structure set up. So for that scientist, for whom the formation of a notion constitutes reality it will be a gradual affair to gather the fact that it is through human judgement that he recognises reality. The already out there now real world has to recognise also the discriminating power of the human mind. He will need to attend to a different sort of data, namely himself in his conscious operations, he will need to form a hypothesis and verify it.
A point to verify, by way of example, is the proposition that it is foolish to withhold judgement when the evidence is in. I find a pretty persuasive instance is the bank statement when I can recognise all the items of expenditure and income! Or it would be foolish to deny one is cold when the wind bites. It would be foolish to deny the invasion of William the Conqueror, the religious changes brought about by Henry VIII or the industrial revolution. Our world consists of things we experience directly like sunrise or sunset and things we have learned about from others. Indeed without the words ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ we might not consciously advert to something so obvious. The world mediated by language and its meaning is very largely the totality of the world we know. The world of meaning perhaps even shapes the psyche and so the things we might imagine, feel and think about. Meaning expressed helps us to notice the world we already experience. So by expressing the idea of rational reflection which acknowledges truth or probability or falsehood one would help the multi-universe scientist to appropriate a personal activity he is constantly entering upon.
Alongside the meaning which shapes us there is the meaning which we bring to bear upon the world so as to shape its future – our expressions, our aims, our work and our capacity to persevere. Alongside a world of meanings which shape our culture in a general way, there are the meanings which we bring into the world personally, especially through the depth and uniqueness of interpersonal love.
One can talk about the being of meaning and indeed the health of meaning in a particular culture or a particular life. A humanist culture, for example, is not open to the love of God. A depressed person has lost much of the sense of personal meaning. If meaning is constitutive of our world, then there are aberrations of meaning leading to sad worlds for people. When the Word walked among us he restored the full health of meaning by deed as well as word: ‘you will know the truth and the truth will make you free’. All things are made new in the light of God’s meaning.
I would like to return to Fr Coreth’s important distinction between real being and notional being. Real being bears witness to God, for the things which exist need not exist. Their existence therefore bears witness to God ‘who made all things, visible and invisible out of nothing’ (Lateran Council, 1215).
Does notional reality also bear witness to God? Notional reality does not exist without a thinker thinking the thought. Just as the physicist could conceive an infinite number of parallel universes, so we find the human mind is capable of conceiving infinity in perhaps an infinite number of different ways. With notional reality we find the ‘potens omnia facere et fieri’ the power to make and become all things of Aristotle and Aquinas. We find a hint of the truth stated by Augustine, ‘you have made us for yourself dear Lord and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee’. With our capacity to think infinite thoughts can we think the thought of the total of the content of possible notional reality as actual? Snail like in any development we cannot claim to have such a content before our mind’s eye. When we think notionally about Pythagoras or some such are we inventing or discovering? If discovering, then the thing discovered must already be thought and so there must be the original thinker of all possible thought, before whom all possibilities are actual, even creation, the possibility of an actual world with its own autonomies, even the deadly autonomy of sin. Such is God. I am close to St Anselm’s argument, it is greater to be than to be thought. The thinker is more than a set of thoughts. There is an amusing (?) moment when Bertrand Russell in Trinity Street said ‘Heavens, Anselm is right’. He never lost the idea of God but could not himself live in a Godly way.

Towards a Personal Philopsophy of Life

If one was becoming a physicist or a historian or a mathematician one would be entering a widespread collaboration and trained to understand certain achievements and perhaps to take them forward. Philosophy at first appears more patchy for it is not as if philosophers all agree. If one holds that there is a perennial philosophy moving through the Greeks, St Justin, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas to modern Thomists, then perhaps one would be surprised to find modern Thomists not agreeing. There was tremendous enthusiasm for Thomism in the 1930’s. After Vatican II it seems to have ebbed away. In 1879, Leo XIII’s encyclical, Aeterni Patris, promoting St Thomas Aquinas was a tremendous rallying cry. I do not have the impression of there being anything equivalent in the post Vatican II world. Perhaps though after Nazism and Communism it is rather a relief to be allowed to think ones own thoughts, even in the face of a mounting secular political correctness.
Fr Lonergan does not see metaphysics as a set of first principles which are evident and which provide a starting point for everyone. He sees metaphysics as an achievement, rather as modern science is an achievement or modern history is an achievement.
He sees the starting point for thought as a direct apprehension of what it is to be human, a phenomenology of our personal experience. Someone said that so and so had decided to accept the world and someone else said ‘gad she’d better’. I think it was Dr Johnson who proved that the world existed by banging the table. Lonergan gets us rather to describe dimensions of our human life and verify certain conclusions in the courtroom of personal experience. He calls this area of thought ‘cognitional theory’.
Our mental life, if we have reached any age is quite shaped up by our family, by what we were taught at school and what we have subsequently learned. No one entering this discourse is a ‘tabula rasa’. We have a language, familiarity with an occupation, papers we read; we have maybe one or two theories; we have maybe certitudes, a religion, duties and loves. One could say all this is purely subjective and that we need a clearer starting point. But Lonergan would claim there are elements of undeniable objectivity to our subjective experience and recognising the norms that bind us and direct us, and which have substantially done so over our lifetime will help us recognise our power to know what lies beyond us and so, in a way which will emerge, to achieve a metaphysic.
Lonergan in his work ‘Insight’ focuses on one aspect of what it is to be human, to have insights of various types. I think it is helpful to many to look at the whole gamut of human experience and to discover a certain objectivity which belongs to our case. We are used to finding a certain sort of objectivity in the already out there now real world making use of experiment, observation and mathematical structures; there is a certain objectivity about historical statements but our heuristic structure will need to be richer than what mathematics can supply if we are to deal with human motivation. Indeed it is likely that a better understanding of the conduct of others will flow from a better understanding of our own minds and hearts.
In physical science there is a flow of data and then a flow of mathematical notions to be verified or falsified by the data. So Newton’s F=MA startled the world with its accuracy and predictive power. So in history there is a flow of data and a hypothetical flow which hopefully is richer than just maths, so that certain positions can be verified, the power for example of the zeitgeist or the spirit of the age.
Our conscious living is similarly a flow and to come up with objective rules about the matter again is a matter of posing a theory and seeing whether or not it is verified. With empirical matters (and consciousness provides a flow of data) scientific status is achieved only by the methodical application of a heuristic structure. The simplest example might have to do with the fact that we all fall asleep and lose consciousness.
Consciousness then can have a zero condition, even though we exist, and are lying abed. One might ask can you prove that you are not conscious in another realm in another way when you are in a deep sleep, in the astral plane say, and the answer is I cannot prove or disprove it from the evidence available to me. I am seeking to account for the conscious flow which I experience.
When we are in the dream state we are not normally responsible for our conduct. It might happen that an angel comes to us and converses with us so that we are able to respond and agree responsibly as is reported to have happened to St Joseph. Presumably, from the standpoint of faith, something similar happens to us when we die. But this is not usually how we experience things. Our supernatural moments if they occur normally occur when we are fully awake. Philip the Chancellor’s distinction between nature and supernature comes to help us in cognitional analysis, the enquiry into the phenomenology of our ordinary consciousness, which phenomenology should include ordinary ways in which we experience the supernatural, if we do.
Ordinarily then the flow of consciousness moves from zero to dream consciousness, where we are not fully present to ourselves in the rich way that belongs to fully conscious experience. The dream of the morning may or may not be analysed as preparation for the day.
We awake into a world of sense experience and a question to be verified or denied is that when we wake into the world of sense experience we wake into the whole world we know. Maybe we wake gradually not sure of where we are, enjoying just animal experience. At some point, we come to into the whole world we know, with its routines, habits, duties, purposes, fears, hopes. We enter upon the stage of history refreshed perhaps by a good night’s sleep. Our world may be just a practical world or our spirit might rise immediately to God in some sort of prayer. Lives are very different. Some people dress with care, others just put on the clothes they threw on the floor the previous night. Conduct differs and underlying values may differ.
A proposition might be: when we apprehend a superior value in the conduct of another we may accept it or reject it. To accept a genuine value gives us the happiness of improving our lives, to reject it leads to rationalisation and a certain unease about our existence. For example, I was astonished to learn that Ghandi spent twenty minutes a day cleaning his teeth. He used to read at the same time. I have felt rebuked. My careless brushing over a life-time has led to countless visits to the dentist. Perhaps in India such visits would be harder and infections more frequent and dangerous. I don’t suppose I should rise to Ghandi’s high standard but I recognise scope for improvement in my life and am glad to do so.
It is the human embodiment of values that improves and challenges us. So we should all pray more, study more, brush our teeth more. Abstract utterances and pious platitudes go over our heads. But Alfred the Great actually attempted to spend one third of his time in prayer (else how should the country be blessed?), one third of his time in study (else how should he be a wise king?), and one third of his time in administration (else how should the Danes be repulsed?). A life well lived by another challenges us. The challenge can exist across time. We have an incipient point for an understanding of the communion of saints. Another proposition then to consider and verify: our understanding can develop, but normally only where there is some understanding to start with.