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.
Tuesday, 4 May 2010
Philosophy
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.
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
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’.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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