Insight and Analysis: Essays in Applying Lonergans Thought

Insight and Analysis

This page intentionally left blank

Insight and Analysis Essays in Applying Lonergan’s Thought

Andrew Beards

The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038 The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX www.continuumbooks.com Copyright © 2010 by Andrew Beards All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the publishers. ISBN: 978-1-4411-5434-7 (hardcover) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed in the United States of America

To Hugo Meynell in gratitude and admiration

This page intentionally left blank

Contents Preface

ix PART 1 KNOWING AND CONSCIOUSNESS

1. Self-Refutation and Self-Knowledge 2. John Searle and Human Consciousness 3. MacIntyre, Critical Realism, and Animal Consciousness

3 21 39

PART 2 PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 4. ÜBERSICHT as Oversight: Problems in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy 5. Anti-Realism and Critical Realism: Dummett and Lonergan

63 78

PART 3 POST-CONTINENTAL TRENDS 6. Badiou’s Metaphysical Basis for Ethics

109

PART 4 ETHICS 7. Moral Conversion and Problems in Proportionalism

147

PART 5 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY 8. Christianity, “INTERCULTURALITY,” and Salvation: Some Perspectives from Lonergan 9. Rahner’s Philosophy: A Lonerganian Critique

179 222

Epilog Index

246 265

This page intentionally left blank

Preface The philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984) emphasized the importance for the theologian of “being at the level of one’s times.” By this, he did not intend to encourage a mere keeping up with current academic fashions. On the contrary, Lonergan’s work sets us the example of a profound dialectical engagement with the current scene from the perspective of a philosophy and theology that draw their inspiration from traditions that stretch back through St. Thomas Aquinas to St. Augustine, Aristotle, and Socrates. Lonergan also claimed that theology’s role is one of mediation between a religion and a culture. This notion includes or sublates the time-honored definition of theology as “faith seeking understanding.” It adds to that definition a historical dimension. The implication of this historical context is not, for Lonergan, historicism, but rather a history of genuine truth in both philosophy and theology. The work of thinking at the level of the times is not a solitary one. In an academic world characterized by specialization, there is a need for collaboration among specialists. In order for this collaboration to be a manifestation of collaborative wisdom, rather than of isolated projects in research which may even be in conflict with one another, Lonergan proposes a methodological account of authentic cooperation. For this cooperation to be effective there must be an agreement on some basic, determinate yet flexible philosophical positions which are open to development but not radical revision. Part of the collaboration envisaged by Lonergan’s approach will involve, therefore, a sympathetic yet dialectical engagement with the philosophies prevalent in a given culture. The essays in this book are inspired by this vision of the scope and purpose of philosophy and of its import for theology. My own principal area of specialization in philosophy concerns the relation of Lonergan’s thought to the analytical tradition. My doctoral work was undertaken at a Canadian university in which the philosophy department stood firmly within the Anglo-American tradition. I was also fortunate enough to study continental philosophy at one of the very few British universities to offer masters and research degrees in this area in the 1980s. I have, therefore, also maintained

x

Preface

an interest in the relationship between Lonergan’s philosophy and the continental world of philosophy. My interest in philosophy, and in Lonergan, began during the period I spent as a seminarian in London and Rome. While I did not complete seminary studies, they left me with an abiding interest in the relationship between philosophy and theology. All these interests and concerns find expression in the essays which make up this book. Earlier versions of the essays were published over the last three decades in the form of articles. I would therefore like to thank the editors of the following journals for their kind permission to use material from these articles in the present work: Gregorianum, The Heythrop Journal, Angelicum, Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies, The Downside Review, Philosophy and Theology, The Thomist. I would also like to thank my wife Christina Beards for her advice on improvements and corrections to an earlier draft of the work. I owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Paul James, Director of Library Services at the Maryvale Institute, who compiled the index for the book.

Part 1 Knowing and Consciousness

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 1

Self-Refutation and Self-Knowledge In this chapter, I wish to examine the contributions made by J.L. Mackie, Jaakko Hintikka, and Bernard Lonergan to an understanding of what is involved in some forms of self-refuting argument (Mackie, 1985; Hintikka, 1974; Lonergan, 1978). My examination begins with Mackie’s formal analysis of such arguments, but the question is raised as to whether his analysis takes us far enough into the functioning of such arguments. I argue that Hintikka’s treatment, which revolves around a discussion of Descartes’ “Cogito” argument, provides us with some indication of the wider epistemological or cognitional context within which such arguments may be situated. Finally, it is suggested that Bernard Lonergan’s use of self-referential arguments, in an attempt to substantiate claims concerning the nature of self-knowledge, serves to clarify further the way in which self-refuting arguments function. I contend that while the kind of formal analysis of self-refutation that Mackie offers is useful, it provides a necessary but hardly sufficient account of the functioning of this type of argument. The analyses of such arguments presented by Hintikka and Lonergan lead me to think that the “logic” of self-refutation may be more philosophically interesting and important than Mackie is inclined to think (Mackie, 1985, pp. 66). Mackie’s formal analysis of self-refuting assertions results in the identification of four distinct types: 1. Pragmatically self-refuting assertions. Such assertions are those in which the way in which something is presented undermines that which is presented. For example, F.P. Ramsey is credited with the story of the man who in a clear, unfaltering voice informs one that he can never say the word “marmalade” without stuttering. In this instance, the way the information is presented provides a counterexample to the claim being made. 2. Absolute self-refutation. Mackie distinguishes two types of absolute selfrefutation. In type (a) one utters what is obviously a logical contradiction. Mackie’s example is, “it can be proved that nothing can be proved.” 3. Absolutely self-refuting arguments of type (b), however, are a little more interesting. Mackie argues that for some utterances we can identify proposition-forming operators that are strictly prefixable to those utterances. For example, in the case of the assertion, “There are no truths” the

4

Insight and Analysis

operator “It is true that” is strictly prefixable. Given that this operator is truth-entailing the resultant proposition is clearly self-destructive: “It is true that nothing is true.” 4. Mackie’s fourth class of self-refuting assertions is the class of, what are termed, Operationally self-refuting assertions. These resemble pragmatically self-refuting assertions, since in both cases that which is asserted is undermined by the way in which it is asserted. Examples of operationally self-refuting assertions would be such utterances as, “I know nothing,” or “I believe nothing.” As Mackie writes, If I assert that I know nothing I am implicitly committing myself to the claim that I know that I know nothing, and hence to a denial of what I originally asserted. (Mackie, 1985, p. 57)

The difference between operationally self-refuting assertions and pragmatically self-refuting assertions is that there is no way of putting forth the former which is not self-defeating, whereas in the case of the latter there may well be ways coherently to express that which one asserts. So, in the case of the person who stutters when pronouncing the word “marmalade” the danger of pragmatic self-refutation through a clear enunciation of the claim can be avoided by writing the claim down. In the case of operationally self-refuting assertions, such as “I know nothing,” however, there is no way of putting forth the claim that does not undermine it. A further point is that in the case of such assertions as “I know nothing” the one who asserts cannot do so coherently, although someone else can say, without fear of self-contradiction, that the other knows nothing. But in the case of absolutely self-refuting assertions such as “Nothing can be known” we are in a different situation: no one can assert an equivalent proposition without self-contradiction. I think Mackie’s clarifications and categorizations are helpful in mapping out some of the distinctions that may be made between different types of self-refuting assertion. However, I think his account fails to bring out some of the fundamental aspects of self-refutation, aspects which manifest the basic similarity between the self-refuting nature of pragmatic, operational, and absolute forms of self-refuting assertions. In order to substantiate this claim it will first be necessary to go beyond the kind of formal treatment offered by Mackie in the direction of the analyses presented by Hintikka and Lonergan. The need to go beyond Mackie’s formal analysis is evident from what appears “at the edges,” so to speak, of that analysis itself. Mackie informs us that if we make utterances of a certain kind we implicitly commit ourselves

Self-Refutation and Self-Knowledge

5

to assertions which may be expressed in terms of operational prefixes, such as “It is the case that,” “I know that,” “I believe that.” However, in making what is implicit in an utterance explicit we are not dealing with formal implication. We say that it just is the case that we can recognize that if x is an utterance uttered with a certain intention, then it is a truth-claim, assertion, or judgment which implies or means something which can be made explicit in terms of an operational prefix, expressed by the words “I know that,” “it is so that,” and so forth. My point here is allied to one which is brought out in Hintikka’s analysis of Descartes’ “Cogito” argument. Hintikka suggests that we can express the argument “I think, therefore I am” symbolically as follows: *B(a) → (∃x)(x=a) However, Hintikka observes that . . . if we have a closer look at the systems of logic in which [*] can be proved, we soon discover that they are based on important existential presuppositions . . . The truth of a sentence of the form [*] turns entirely on existential presuppositions. If they are given up, the provability of [*] goes by the board. (Hintikka, 1974, pp. 101–102)

In order to convict oneself or another of a self-refuting assertion one has to show it is the case that an utterance of a certain kind has occurred. The expressions “Nothing is true,” or “I know nothing” may be expressed, not with the intention of making a truth-claim, or judgment, but could, for instance, be sung for the aesthetic pleasure of their sound; a foreigner who perhaps knows no English could sing them to such an end. Just as in the case of the “I” of the “Cogito” argument, then, so in the case of these linguistic expressions, it needs to be established that an intentional act of a certain kind has occurred. We could express the matter by reflecting upon the following syllogism: If I assert that I know nothing, then I make a contradictory assertion; I do assert that I know nothing; therefore I make an assertion that is contradictory.

The question I am concerned with, and to which Hintikka’s remarks draw our attention, is how we establish the truth of the minor premise of this syllogism such that the truth of the conclusion follows. What I think the philosophical tradition has always sensed as the uniquely compelling force of self-refuting arguments is the way in which the truth of the minor premise

6

Insight and Analysis

in our syllogism above appears inescapable, once one is engaged in such arguments. I think it is that feature of self-refutation that is not explored in Mackie’s formal treatment, and it is a feature that I wish to concentrate on as I turn to examine other points brought out in Hintikka’s paper. Hintikka has a somewhat ambivalent attitude to Descartes’ argument as it stands, and sees a need to retrieve what he takes to be genuine insights in the argument, while distinguishing these from elements that are undesirable. Such an undesirable aspect would be Descartes’ “inward looking” intuitionism, which Hume found so objectionable.1 Hintikka also believes that there are characterizations of the “Cogito” argument in Descartes’ writings which suggest that at times he took it to be something like a logical deduction derived from a truth intuited more geometrico (Hintikka, 1974, pp. 100–102). That this is not an acceptable option for Hintikka is clear from the argument summarized above: a logical formulation of the argument still leaves open the question of the existence of the Cogito. Hintikka further observes that it is not strictly true to say that I cannot coherently doubt my own existence. There is nothing self-refuting about raising the question “Do I exist?,” nor am I involved in self-refutation if I utter the proposition “I do not exist” as I muse on its implications, or attempt to grasp the meaning of the words. The proposition becomes selfrefuting when I utter it with the intention of putting forth a truth-claim, or judgment. As Hintikka points out, this is brought out in Aquinas’ presentation of a version of such an argument. For Aquinas, self-inconsistency arises when one thinks such propositions as “I do not exist,” or “I do not know” with assent cum assensu (Hintikka, p. 109).2 It is not the case, then, that some blinding intuition of one’s own existence prevents one from raising the question as to whether one exists, and indeed Descartes himself raises such a question. Hintikka’s analysis of the way the “Cogito” argument functions is in terms of what he calls performative inconsistency. The performance of denying one’s existence undermines the assertion one makes that one does not exist. Such inconsistency appears when one attempts to convince oneself or another of the truth of propositions of the kind, “I know nothing,” “I do not exist.” Naturally, Hintikka’s position here is similar to that of Mackie’s. It can be said that Hintikka’s notion of “performance” is further subdivided by Mackie into cases of pragmatic, absolute, and operational inconsistency.

1 Lonergan also finds Descartes’ “Intuitionism” objectionable. See Lonergan, 1978, pp. 338–389. 2 Hintikka refers to St. Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate X, 12 ad 7.

Self-Refutation and Self-Knowledge

7

However, Hintikka draws attention to the intention of the speaker in a way that Mackie does not. For he observes that for an utterance to be self-refuting it must be an instance of an act . . . which is prima facie designed to serve the same purposes as the act of uttering a declarative sentence with the intention of conveying bona fide information. (Hintikka, 1974, pp. 101–102)

Another distinctive feature of Hintikka’s examination is his identification, not only of self-refuting, or inconsistent sentences, but of sentences in the happier condition of being, what he terms, “self-verifying.” He writes, In the same way as existentially inconsistent sentences defeat themselves when they are uttered or thought of, their negations verify themselves when they are expressly uttered or otherwise professed. Such sentences may therefore be called existentially self-verifying. The simplest example of a sentence of this kind is “I am,” in Descartes’ Latin ego sum, ergo existo. (Hintikka, 1974, p. 108)

With regard to Mackie’s formal analysis of self-refuting assertions I raised the question as to how one makes explicit what is implicit in an utterance, such that the utterance is shown to be inconsistent. Hintikka does pay more attention to the matter of the intention with which an utterance is presented. However, I do not think that Hintikka elucidates the way in which that which is implicit in an utterance, characterized by a particular intention, is made explicit. One can observe that Hintikka’s use of the expression “selfverifying sentences” is somewhat obscure. Is it not rather odd to think of a sentence “verifying itself,” particularly as Hintikka has insisted that such sentences are seen as self-defeating, or self-verifying in the context of argument? It is surely the case that verification or refutation are activities carried out by an agent. If that is so, then the invitation is there to investigate further such a process of verification or refutation. As I remarked above regarding Mackie’s approach, it is a feature of arguments based on self-refutation that there is something compelling about them, not simply in terms of logical consistency, but in the way they involve reference to what the speaker is aware to be his intention. However much we may feel Descartes’ general epistemological position was at fault, perhaps encumbered with an intuitionist notion of knowledge, still the question his discussion throws up is a valid one: what epistemological account is to be offered of self-refuting arguments? How is the implicit nature of an intentional act rendered explicit? How does an agent carry out the process of refuting or verifying coherent or incoherent propositions of the type typically found in self-refuting arguments?

8

Insight and Analysis

It is with regard to such questions that Bernard Lonergan’s approach to self-refutation is worthy of examination. But before outlining some of the features of Lonergan’s discussion I will, by way of introduction to his approach, examine a matter which arises from a comment on Hintikka’s paper made by Donald Sievert. Sievert observes that Hintikka’s account of Descartes’ argument concentrates exclusively on the assertion that “I do not exist” is an existentially inconsistent sentence. However, as Sievert points out, Descartes takes it that one can establish one’s existence as something which is involved in a number of mental activities, including doubting, denying, willing, affirming, and imagining (Sievert, 1975, pp. 57–59). From what we have said above, concerning Hintikka’s analysis of Descartes’ argument, we might conclude that Hintikka would insist that it is only when we have an act which is selfreferentially inconsistent that we can properly employ an argument that accuses the speaker of self-refutation. Acts of questioning, imagining, pondering, or willing are not such acts, but acts of judgment or assent, concerning the existence of the speaker, or his ability to know or judge are such acts. However, Sievert’s observation may lead us to reflect on whether or not other kinds of mental activity, besides acts of truth-assertion, or judgments, may not feature in arguments that have, in general, to do with self-reference, or self-refutation. Let us consider the case of asking questions. If I ask the question, “Do I ask questions?” it would seem that I have evidence to hand sufficient to answer the question asked in the affirmative. But it is not the case that the truth claim “I do not ask questions” is self-defeating in the way that “I make no truth claims” is. The act of denial is not undermined by itself. However, we may remember that in order to bring out that a judgment or truth claim is self-referentially inconsistent we need to make explicit, in terms of what Mackie calls prefixes perhaps, that the utterance is an utterance of a particular kind. The process of explication can also take place with regard to my asking and answering the question “Do I ask questions?” So, I can make explicit what is implicit in my act of asking a question by prefixing the expression “I ask the question” to my interrogative utterance “Do I ask questions?” In that case, if I answer my question in the negative I can identify logical inconsistency by constructing the following sentence: “I ask the question, ‘Do I ask questions?’ and I answer, ‘No. I do not ask questions’.” Once one has rendered explicit what is implicitly contradictory in the situation, by the construction of this sentence, one may go on to identify a formal contradiction. My point is, then, that while it is true that an act which is not itself a truth claim cannot be self-referentially inconsistent, still on a broader interpretation

Self-Refutation and Self-Knowledge

9

of what we mean by claims that are self-refuting, other kinds of mental activity may be the focus of the argument. As I shall argue below, the reason for this is that, whether it is a case of a truth claim, or the case of some other act, such as a question, the inconsistency highlighted by a charge of selfrefutation is an inconsistency between what one ostensibly denies, on the one hand, as opposed to what one is actually aware of, on the other. If this be the correct view of the matter, then one could extend the above analysis of asking questions to embrace other items of which one is aware. It would not appear from Mackie’s formal analysis of self-refutation that statements about sensible experience should feature in discussions of the issue. And I would agree that statements such as “I am not hearing,” or “I am not tasting” are unlike assertions such as, “I know nothing,” or “I make no truth claims.” In asserting the former I do not fall into the trap of undermining the affirmation I make by the very act of making it, as I do when asserting the latter. However, it has been argued above that to make explicit an implicit inconsistency between an affirmation and its content I must be in a position to known that an utterance is an utterance of a certain kind— that it is uttered with a certain intention. It is this knowledge which allows the expression of Mackie’s operational prefixes. If I come to know that such and such an utterance is, say, a truth claim, then I can grasp an inconsistency between the content of my expression and what I am aware of in asserting such an expression. Similar considerations may be applied to such affirmations as, “I do not hear,” or “I do not taste.” I may be in a condition in which I make these assertions while at the same time being aware of evidence that would falsify them. As such, one could apply the analysis offered above in the case of asking questions to these cases. If I am in a situation in which I explicitly deny what I am implicitly aware of, this could be rendered explicit in a sentence such as the following: “This is an experience of hearing and I am not hearing.” In uttering the words “I am not making a judgment,” or in uttering the words “I am not hearing,” I may be in a position to advert to the evidence which falsifies both statements provided by what I am aware of, or conscious of at the time of utterance. Let us examine the case of the assertion, “I do not argue.” Again, it would not appear that there is anything self-referentially inconsistent about this assertion. “I do not argue” is not self-refuting in the way that “I do not make truth claims” is; the act of putting the item forth does not undermine the content of what is expressed. Indeed, there are many cases where such an expression would not seem odd—someone could be informing us that, as a matter of policy, he refrains from argument. But again, the assertion may be undermined in a situation in which one adverts to the fact that one is involved in an argument, perhaps attempting to argue that one does not

10

Insight and Analysis

argue. Any notion of “arguing” would certainly involve more than one act—the simple act of making a truth claim. If one were engaged in argument with someone it could be said that this arguing involved interrelated acts, such as attending to the sights and sounds of one’s interlocutor’s words and gestures, the raising of questions concerning the meaning that he was trying to get across, and further questions about the cogency or probable truth of what he maintained, and the making of judgments as to the strength of his position. If, then, the judgment, or truth claim that, say, one does not argue is one which is made for a reason, or for reasons, then one would say that in making this truth claim one is also aware of other matters besides the truth claim itself. So if I claim that there is no milk left in the fridge, I am aware of more than simply making a truth claim, I am aware of my reasons for making it; I am aware of such matters as, for example, the experience of looking in the fridge, or of hearing what my wife says about the absence of milk. Indeed, it appears that the idea of a judgment or a truth claim which does not make reference to other items makes no sense.3 Lonergan offers an account of self-knowledge which deploys some of the self-refuting and self-confirming moves we have been considering. What is illuminating in his analysis, for the purposes of the issue under discussion, is the way in which he tackles the question I have emphasized so far: how are we to understand the process by which an implicit contradiction in an utterance is rendered explicit? Lonergan’s account of self-knowledge is a matter of raising and answering the question “Am I a knower?” He explains that by “a knower” is meant one who is aware of such experiences as seeing, hearing, imagining, asking questions, understanding, reflecting on evidence, and judging as to what is probably, or certainly so or not so. Such, then, are some of the truthconditions of the proposition “I am a knower,” and if one has some grasp of what those conditions mean, then, Lonergan contends, one may grasp that those conditions are given, or fulfilled in one’s conscious experience. The attempt to argue that one does not have some sensible experience, that one does not imagine, ask questions, understand meanings, and make judgments on the basis of evidence will prove to be incoherent. For the evidence for the proposition “I am a knower” is provided by the conscious activities of trying to deny the proposition (Lonergan, 1978, pp. 319–42).

3 What I mean by “refer” is that in making a claim, or judgment, one is aware of referring to the evidence or reasons based on which one makes the claim.

Self-Refutation and Self-Knowledge

11

On this view, the self-knowledge at issue is arrived at by a judgment which involves understanding the following: 1. a conditioned; 2. a link between the conditioned and its conditions; and 3. the fulfillment of the conditions. The relevant conditioned is the statement, I am a knower. The link between the conditioned and its conditions may be cast in the proposition, I am a knower, if I am a . . . unity . . ., characterized by acts of sensing, perceiving, imagining, inquiring, understanding, formulating, reflecting, . . . and judging. The fulfillment of the conditions is given in consciousness. (Lonergan, 1978, p. 319)

On this view the knowledge of the truth of the proposition “I am a knower” is had in much the same way as any other item of knowledge concerning fact. Just as the proposition “There is no milk left in the fridge” is known to be true if its truth-conditions are given, so in the case of the proposition “I am a knower.” In the case of this latter proposition one grasps that those truth-conditions are fulfilled by adverting to one’s own conscious experience. What appears to be the peculiar strength of self-refuting arguments, however, resides in the fact that, if I am alert enough to raise and attempt to answer the question “Am I a knower?” I should be alert enough to realize that, without a doubt, the truth-conditions for the proposition are fulfilled in my own experience of inquiry. We do not appear to find ourselves in that position with other types of knowledge claim. So in the case of scientific theory, or even of what G.E. Moore took to be certainties, we are not in a position definitely to claim that the truth-conditions of the relevant propositions are known as given. For in the case of one of Moore’s celebrated certainties, one could still ask further questions concerning whether what appeared to be one’s hands before one were such, or were an illusion. Usually in such cases the best we can say is that one hypothesis is better founded than another, in part, at least, because we grasp that some evidence, or more evidence is given for a particular hypothesis (that I have such and such experiences suggests that I do have two hands rather than suggesting I do not have them). Attention was drawn above to Hintikka’s observation that to maintain that one could not doubt one’s existence is not, strictly speaking, correct. One can, as Descartes does, raise the question “Do I exist?” One is not so blinded by some prior intuition of one’s existence that this possibility is precluded. Lonergan’s attempt to substantiate claims to self-knowledge implies that the acquisition of such knowledge is precisely the result of

12

Insight and Analysis

raising similar questions about one’s own cognitive activities, and answering these on the basis of the evidence provided by the activities themselves. On this view one does not circumvent the epistemic process of proposing a proposition for examination, and the attempt to determine whether the truth-conditions of the proposition are given, by some prior intuition of self-knowledge. Lonergan’s analysis draws attention to the reason why arguments based on the charge of self-refutation are often so compelling and so damaging to the opposed position. It is clear that we are not dealing simply or solely with logical contradiction in these cases—logical contradictions may be created at will, and any set of sentences is grist to the mill. In the treatments of selfrefuting arguments we have been considering in this chapter our attention is drawn to the way charges of self-refutation envisage the making explicit of a contradiction which is somehow implicit in the situation. On Lonergan’s view, what is so compelling about such moves is that, if we are alert enough to attend to the evidence provided by our own activities, such as questioning, thinking, and judging (and it would appear that if one is alert enough to be reading this chapter, one will be alert enough to perform the task), then one will grasp that the truth-conditions of the propositions affirming that one does perform such activities are given. It is one thing to consider hypothetical instances of where such an argument might be applied, it is another to actually apply such an argument. And the success of such an application will depend upon the ability, the intellectual alertness, of the one to whom it is applied. However, the understanding of hypothetical cases of application relies on the fact that we can make sense of the way such moves apply de facto; one can make sense of the invitation, issued by such a move, to verify or falsify propositions about one’s cognitional abilities by attending to that of which one is aware. The strength of moves based on the charge of self-refutation, then, derives from the fact that if one adverts to the evidence for a proposition, provided by one’s own conscious activities, then one may be in a position where there is no further question as to whether or not the truth-conditions of the proposition are fulfilled: they clearly are. Hintikka is right, therefore, to treat “self-defeating” sentences and “self-verifying” sentences as two sides of the same coin. Since the strength of an argument that accuses one of incoherence, in asserting that one does not assert, resides in its ability to make one notice that the truth-conditions for the negation of that proposition are fulfilled, so an argument that leads one to advert to the fact that the raising of the question “Do I question?” provides evidence sufficient for an affirmative answer, is equally strong, or compelling.

Self-Refutation and Self-Knowledge

13

An objection to the approach I have argued for here, in explaining how one renders explicit the implicit contradiction between, say, an assertion and the content put forward in the assertion, would be that one does not need to have recourse to one’s conscious experience in order to effect such an explication. Such an objection could, no doubt, be part of a more general philosophical argument against the identification of mental acts. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to address larger epistemological issues, I would say that I consider the arguments offered here, concerning the way we can make sense of the functioning of types of self-refutation, constitute arguments in favor of an epistemological position that takes mental or intentional acts seriously. No doubt the objection could be made that one can make explicit what is implicit, in various types of utterance, because of the way such utterances are typically made in one’s linguistic community. Of course it is true that one learns the meaning of such expressions as “questioning,” or “making truth claims” in the context of a world of linguistic communication, but the question is, are one’s uses of such expressions similar to the uses of the word “red” by someone unfortunate enough to be born blind, or are they uses which have sometimes been applications of those expressions justified by appeal to one’s own experience? It is one thing to learn, from general usage, what the verb “to stutter” means, it is another to grasp that I myself am stuttering. Lonergan’s analysis highlights a further issue of considerable interest concerning the functioning of self-referential arguments. It is the case that people can genuinely hold skeptical positions such that they deny that anything can be known, or that they make truth claims, or whatever. One may feel that such views are bound up with deep-rooted philosophical confusions. Be that as it may, if refutation of the skeptic is a possibility, how is it that someone can get into the state of ostensibly denying that which they are aware of in the very denial? One may recall here Wittgenstein’s view that to free people from philosophical confusion one need point to what, in some way, they “always already knew,” and perhaps one can see this maieutic as operative in the places in On Certainty where Wittgenstein himself offers a “refutation” of a certain form of skepticism (Wittgenstein, 1972, #114, #306, #369, #456). But the question is, if the skeptic has “already known” what he knows at the end of the argument against his position, how was he ever a skeptic in the first place? Should we not take Wittgenstein’s “already know” expression here as a kind of metaphor which is, perhaps, worthy of further analysis? Lonergan’s solution to this problem is to distinguish awareness, or consciousness, from knowledge. One may be aware, or conscious of hearing,

14

Insight and Analysis

touching, excogitating, questioning, judging, and asserting, but being so aware does not necessarily entail that one knows that one is involved in such activities. The distinction between awareness, on the one hand, and knowledge-that, on the other, is one also made in Mackie’s paper “Are there any Incorrigible Empirical Statements?” (Mackie, 1985, pp. 22–40, 33–37). Mackie’s application of the distinction is with regard to our awareness of sensible experiences as distinct from our knowledge of them. But I think that his distinction can be extended to apply to other conscious mental activity. Mackie’s argument for the distinction between awareness and knowledgethat has to do, in part, with cases in which we may have fleeting sensible experiences which we may fail successfully to characterize in our knowledge claims regarding them. So, someone may put their foot into a hot bath and then withdraw it quickly in pain. However, they may be nonplussed in attempting to answer the question as to precisely what they felt. Having experienced something is no guarantee of infallibility in making judgments about what one experienced. A friend may find one musing, looking out of the window, and put the question “What are you thinking about?” Again, one may find it difficult to answer—there were several strands to the thinking one was engaged in, and one’s first report of what one was thinking about, one’s knowledge-that claim, may need to be revised or corrected as one recalls other data. One may well remain bemused by the inability to recall some of the themes of one’s musings. Yet one is in no doubt about the fact that one was aware of several strands of thought. On any view of knowledge as warranted assertion, or as judgment as to the fulfillment of the truth-conditions of a proposition, such a distinction appears inevitable. If one is standing in a wood, attempting to calculate the height of a tree which is before one, then it is the case that one is conscious of the sensible features of the situation, of one’s calculations, and, if one progresses that far, of one’s truth claim concerning the height of the tree. One will then be aware of making a truth claim, or knowledge claim, about the tree, but one will not, normally, be on the lookout to make a knowledge claim concerning one’s judgment on the height of the tree. That is a matter of raising a further question about the truth of the proposition “I am making a judgment about a tree,” and answering that question by adverting to the evidence, or data, provided by one’s awareness of the nature of the type of act one performs. The distinction between conscious experience and knowledge of that experience, which is made by both Mackie and Lonergan, is not one often found in the literature, and, no doubt, from some philosophical perspectives it appears highly contentious. It is of course true that we can apply the

Self-Refutation and Self-Knowledge

15

expression “knowledge that” in a less restricted way. Ordinary usage suggests as much. So, someone says of what they are engaged in, “look, I know what I am doing,” and it might appear that one is sponsoring a somewhat strange reform of common usage in insisting that the person does not know what they are doing, but is, rather, conscious of what they are doing. But I think that Lonergan’s and Mackie’s distinction between awareness and knowledge-that, in the “strict” sense, has explanatory power. It does explain, I believe, how it is that one can, in all earnestness, put forth skeptical claims which are actually incoherent, and, furthermore, how one can come to revise those claims on the basis of the evidence of one’s own intentions in putting forth those claims, evidence which one had not adverted to prior to the invitation to do so, offered by the charge of self-refutation brought against one’s argument. To return to the example of Wittgenstein’s argument against the skeptic, we may now clarify what could be meant by saying that, in answering the skeptic something which he “always already knew” is pointed out to him. Wittgenstein’s antiskeptical parry involves pointing out to the septic, who claims to know nothing, that he must at least know the meaning of the words he uses to put forth his claim. Naturally, if the skeptic already knew, in the “strict” sense, that he knows the meaning of his words he would not require an argument to bring it to his attention: he would not be a skeptic. What is going on here, I would suggest, is that Wittgenstein’s riposte has the aim of drawing the skeptic’s attention to what he already “knows,” in the sense of that of which he is already aware: he is already conscious of his intelligent use of words to express his conviction. This awareness may itself become the object of a knowledge-that proposition through the skeptic’s advertence to his awareness, providing evidence for the proposition “I ‘know’ (or am aware of) the meaning of my words.” Given this sketch of Lonergan’s approach, it may be worthwhile at this point to focus attention on a matter which is a central concern of Mackie’s paper, “Are there any Incorrigible Empirical Statements?” I have argued that what is experienced to be the most compelling feature of some of the arguments based on a charge of self-refutation is that, if one is alert enough, the truth-conditions of such propositions as “I question” or “I make judgments” may be understood as given in one’s awareness of one’s own activities, and that in a way which is wholly unambiguous. Similarly, such a proposition as “I do not make judgments” may be understood to be falsified by the provision of a counterexample, provided by one’s conscious experience of making such a judgment; one definitely knows that the truth-conditions for the proposition are not given because the truth-conditions of its negation are given.

16

Insight and Analysis

As I understand him, Mackie’s central concern in the paper “Are there any Incorrigible Empirical Statements?” is to argue against the view that there are empirical statements which are in principle incorrigible. Mackie’s distinction between “consciousness of” and “knowledge that” is deployed precisely against the view that sensible experiences are in principle incorrigible (Mackie, 1985, pp. 33–37). In accord with Mackie’s approach, I think it might be argued that “incorrigibility” and “corrigibility” are qualities that have to do, not with sense experience, nor with any kind of conscious experience of one’s activities, but rather, with knowledge-that claims, or judgments. As Mackie points out, the proposition about my experiencing such and such is something I may revise in the light of further data I later recall concerning my experiences. I may not be alert enough, or experiences may be too fleeting or diffuse for me to say that the truth-conditions of some putative proposition were fulfilled in a particular experience. If one’s attempt to capture the nuances of one’s flow of consciousness rises to the level of a Marcel Proust, one may find one’s truth claims concerning the contents of that experience are continually undergoing revision and refinement. This is no less the case with the judgments that have to do with the truth of propositions such as, “I question,” “I make judgments,” “I hear” and so forth. I may not be alert enough to attend to the evidence provided by my own mental activities to give a decisive answer to questions concerning the truth of these propositions; I may be distracted before I can give the matter proper attention. If someone puts such questions to me as I come round from a deep sleep, or when I am under the influence of intoxicants I may not be in a fit state to give a reasonable answer. Such propositions are not, then, in principle infallibly true, nor are we certain of them simply by being conscious of questioning, hearing, and judging. However, if one is alert enough, and if the conditions are suitable, one may grasp that, de facto, the truth-conditions for such propositions are fulfilled in one’s experience, and be in a position to be certain of that fact. I do not know if someone looking at the words on this page is sufficiently alert to grasp the truth of the proposition that “someone is reading,” however, I would say that if they have been alert enough to follow something of the argument so far, they are probably in a position to grasp the truth of the proposition. It is a matter to be settled by the reader. What one can note, however, is that the attempt to argue that one could never be sure that the truth-conditions for propositions regarding mental activities are fulfilled, because one might never be in a position clearly to grasp that they are, is self-defeating. If one is in a position to put forth such an argument as a reasonable claim, then one will be in a position, one will be alert enough, to notice that the truth-conditions for such propositions are fulfilled in one’s conscious activities.

Self-Refutation and Self-Knowledge

17

The position that one can come to make truth claims of which one is certain is, to say the least, highly contested. One objection to this view which I will touch upon here is put forward by Jonathan Dancy as a criticism of Roderick Chisholm’s position (Dancy, 1985, pp. 59–61). Chisholm makes a distinction between mistakes which are merely verbal and those which are substantive. He contends that one may be certain in making a report of an experience, even if one makes a mistake regarding the meaning of the words one employs. Dancy denies the validity of the distinction and maintains that, if one describes an experience as an experience of “pink,” while mistaking the meaning of “pink” (that it refers to, say, yellow and not to pink) then one is guilty, not merely of a verbal, but also of a substantive error. Given such a view, one could go on to challenge the position argued for in this chapter, that one can be certain that the proposition “I ask questions” is true because one has grasped that the truth-conditions of the proposition are given in one’s own conscious experience. Perhaps one mistakes the meaning of the word “question.” In response, I would defend Chisholm’s distinction. Let us imagine that an Englishman, who is learning Italian, is out on a walk with friends in the Italian countryside. He spots something moving in the undergrowth, and on the basis of what he can see of the animal and its movement, he excitedly informs his friends that there is “un tasso” in the bushes. Now, he has, in fact, mistakenly applied the word “tasso,” which means “badger” in English, to what is actually a rabbit, “coniglio” in Italian. But it does make perfect sense to ask the question as to what kind of mistake he has made. It may be that what he understood by the word “tasso” is what his Italian friends understand by the word, so that both he and they would agree on the sort of truth-conditions, regarding the animal’s appearance and movements, which would have to be fulfilled, were the claim that “there is a badger in the undergrowth” to be true. He may therefore be aware of correct Italian usage, but upon further investigation, the animal turns out to be a rabbit. The Englishman may, on the other hand, understand by “tasso” what the Italians understand by “coniglio,” and then his mistake is verbal but not substantive. In fact, we have four possibilities: the Englishman makes a mistake about the meaning of the Italian word, but given his understanding of it, he, (1) applies it correctly, or (2) applies it incorrectly; he makes no mistake about the meaning of the Italian word and (3) applies it incorrectly, or (4) applies it correctly. No doubt we are in an area here where far-reaching questions about meaning are at issue. But I would suggest that in the case of, say, raising and answering the question as to whether I question, one might reasonably proceed as follows: one may say that if by questioning is meant, or I mean, the kind of activity I have been involved in then it is the case that the

18

Insight and Analysis

truth-conditions of the proposition “I question” are, in fact, fulfilled. One can provide one’s own stipulative definition. This position does not entail a whole-scale defense of the notion of a private language, and I think one can argue such a view without denying the importance of the social matrix for the learning of language. However, I would note, in passing, that I am unsure just how much some arguments concerning the social nature of linguistic meaning and acquisition are supposed to prove. If they are supposed to demonstrate the falsity of anything like a Cartesian starting point then, it seems to me, they beg the question. For if such arguments are supposed to convince us that there is a world of other communicators, in whose company I have acquired my linguistic abilities, it appears open to the skeptic, of Cartesian inspiration, to shrink that community to oneself and, perhaps, the “evil” or “benign genius.” He can maintain that although it appears there is a world peopled with many other communicators, perhaps it is the case that it has really been the evil genius who has put meanings in my mind, and created the illusion that a wider community has been responsible. Supposing the skeptic were to attempt to escape the Wittgensteinian charge of incoherence by saying that he is not sure of the meaning of the words in which he puts forth his case, because it might always be the case that he mistook the meanings which those words have in common use. I think our response to this would be that, insofar as the skeptic is putting forward a reasonable case at all, he is aware of meaning something by the words he uses. Even the justification he brings forward for his move, that there is no distinction to be made between verbal and substantive mistakes, is one expressed in words whose meaning the skeptic is aware of; certainly, if he is making the argument at all he must mean something by these words, even if they are not employed in the way one would employ them in standard English. In conclusion, I should like to return to a point made above. Knowledge of self, insofar as it is knowledge-that, is acquired in the same way as any other item of factual knowledge. It is a matter of understanding the meaning of propositions concerning the self and its activities, raising the question as to the truth of those propositions, and answering that question on the basis of the evidence, in this case the evidence of one’s own cognitional activities, activities which will have been utilized in the formulation and raising of the question itself. The problem, then, is not that one starts from some immediate knowledge of self and then has the problem of “getting outside,” to hook up with the rest of the world. Indeed, one may observe how the posing of the problem in these terms itself tacitly assumes the truth of knowledge claims concerning a situation: there is a self, and it really is the case that it is cut off from a world which exists outside. Insofar as one has already affirmed

Self-Refutation and Self-Knowledge

19

the truth of such propositions one has already claimed knowledge of more than the self. What is unusual in the case of self-knowledge is that the evidence that the truth-conditions of propositions concerning the self are fulfilled is given in one’s conscious activity in a way which is unambiguous; there is no need to ask further whether one does make judgments once one has adverted to the act of making one. In this way, it could be argued that such knowledge claims prove to be something of an epistemological limit case, or standard, against which other claims, where there is not the same certainty of the fulfillment of truth-conditions, are measured. But the structure of verification in the case of other claims is the same, even though that justification does not normally reach the limit where there is no further question as to whether the truth-conditions of the proposition are fulfilled. That I have the experience of feeling and seeing my hands and that I have no reason to think that I am hallucinating (I think I am in good health), provide evidence for the claim that I have hands and count against the claim that I have not. As in the case of attempting to verify the proposition “I make judgments,” so with the proposition “I have two hands” verification is a matter of understanding what truth-conditions would have to be fulfilled, were the proposition to be true, and of asking and answering questions as to whether those truth-conditions are given. It is often thought that arguments based on the charge of self-refutation, while perhaps useful in closing off some skeptical paths, are themselves rather uninteresting philosophically. They are “dead-end” signs which do not themselves point in the direction of any avenues worthy of philosophical exploration. This is Mackie’s attitude to such arguments (Mackie, 1985, pp. 66–67). I have argued that, on the contrary, when one investigates further the way some of these arguments function one becomes cognizant of the fact that wider epistemological and cognitional issues are at stake. By examining Lonergan’s contribution to the elucidation of the way in which self-refuting arguments function, I hope I have indicated something of the philosophical importance of a proper appreciation of such arguments. For I believe that such an understanding indicates avenues of inquiry that may turn out to be crucial for the fundamental questions at issue in contemporary realist/anti-realist debates.

References Dancy, J. 1985: Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hintikka, J. 1974: “‘Cogito Ergo Sum’: Inference or Performance?” in Knowledge and the Known. Chapter 5. Dordrecht and Boston, MA: D. Reidel Publishing.

20

Insight and Analysis

Lonergan, B. 1978: Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. San Francisco, CA and London: Harper and Row. Mackie, J.L. 1985: Logic and Knowledge. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sievert, D. 1975: “Descartes’ Self-Doubt,” Philosophical Review, 84: 51–69. Wittgenstein, L. 1972: On Certainty, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and H. von Wright. New York: Harper Torch Books.

Chapter 2

John Searle and Human Consciousness John Searle’s philosophical interests began in the philosophy of language; he went on to explore the nature of human intentional behavior, and later in his philosophical career he produced a work concerned with perennial questions associated with the philosophy of mind: the nature of consciousness and the mind-body problem.1 To Searle, such a progression appears natural and reasonable. However, the later book, The Rediscovery of Mind,2 can be understood as a defense of the legitimacy of his turn to the mental and consciousness, against the many analytical philosophers for whom such an approach is an illegitimate attempt to revive philosophy of mind à la Descartes. From the perspective of some notable analytical philosophers of mind Searle is unorthodox. One would not deny that there have been notable and influential champions of a philosophy of mind which takes mental acts seriously (one thinks of G.E.M. Anscombe, Peter Geach, Anthony Kenny, and Roderick Chisholm). However, as Searle’s book makes clear, the notion of conscious mental acts is attacked or dismissed by those analytic philosophers who adhere to one or other of the dominant explanatory paradigms invoked to account for talk of the mental: functionalism, Artificial Intelligence theory, eliminative materialism, theories of “the language of the mind.” For those influenced in their thinking by philosophical traditions that emerge from Aristotle or, in the more recent past, from Husserl, such denials of conscious mental life can appear very odd. The denial of what appears obvious is also a source of bewilderment for Searle. He writes, I believe there is no other area of contemporary analytic philosophy where so much is said that is so implausible . . . [I]n the philosophy of mind, obvious facts about the mental, such as that we all really do have subjective conscious mental states and that these are not eliminable in favour of anything else, are routinely denied by many, perhaps most, of the advanced thinkers in the subject.3

For the most part, I find the philosophical arguments Searle adduces to demonstrate that “King philosophy of mind” has no clothes convincing. One

1 See Searle’s works, Speech-Acts (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969) and Intentionality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). 2 The Rediscovery of Mind (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1992). 3 Ibid., p. 3.

22

Insight and Analysis

of my aims in this chapter will be to highlight some of what I take to be the more important arguments he employs against dominant views in the philosophy of mind. However, I will also argue that while his attempt at a rediscovery of mind is helpful, insofar as it clears away much that blocks the path to rediscovery, the positive results of his explorations are themselves rather meager. I would say that although human consciousness is the concern of his recent work, the conscious agent, or person, in his or her intelligent, reasonable, and responsible manifestations hardly puts in an appearance in his analyses. Only once or twice in the book does one observe a passing reference to the human agent. Further, I will suggest that the absence of any adequate treatment of the conscious subject, or agent, in Searle’s work goes hand in hand with the strange compromise Searle arrives at between a reductionist and an antireductionist position on human consciousness.

1. The Anti-Cartesian Culture How is it that the obvious facts about human conscious life come to be denied by philosophers? Searle suggests that in answering this question more is needed than simply a perusal of the philosophical arguments on either side. The denial of something so obvious requires an acknowledgment of something operative in our Western philosophical tradition which leads many to deny or explain away obvious, or “folk psychological” facts. Searle argues that there are a number of factors influencing the cultural horizon within which analytical philosophers work which play a part in this flight from the mental. To begin with, it is thought that an acknowledgment of the mental, of conscious intentional acts, would lead one into the snares of Cartesian subjectivism, solipsism and, worst of all, spiritualism. As Searle remarks, “Acceptance of the current views is motivated not so much by an independent conviction of their truth as by a terror of what are apparently the only alternatives”;4 and he goes on to remark, “We are reluctant to concede any of the commonsense facts that sound “Cartesian” because it seems that if we accept the facts, we will have to accept the whole Cartesian metaphysics.”5 Searle points out that one has to strive to be honest about the horizon, or set of assumptions, which are the background to one’s philosophical work. So, one has to acknowledge that the defense of materialism is not the defense

4 Ibid., pp. 3–4. 5 Ibid., p. 13.

John Searle and Human Consciousness

23

of “science”; rather, in defending materialism one is defending a philosophical position operative in one’s worldview.6 Such identifications of the “scientific approach” with a philosophical position lead many philosophers to accept the terms “physical” and “real” as coextensive, indeed synonymous.7 A further aspect of this cultural bias against the mental is the assumption that if we allow verification of first-person mental states as objective, this would threaten our view of objectivity as essentially public. The notion is that our modern scientific worldview is committed to a criterion of objectivity as publicity, such that the personal or subjective judgments concerning “my conscious states” do not meet scientific criteria for verification. As Searle writes, The subjectivist ontology of the mental seems intolerable. It seems intolerable metaphysically that there should be irreducibly subjective, “private” entities in the world, and intolerable epistemologically that there should be asymmetry between the way that each person knows his or her inner mental phenomena and the way others from the outside know of them. The crisis produces a flight from subjectivity.8

Searle suggests that an in-depth investigation of the cultural forces at work here would be a major project. But, in the spirit of Richard Rorty or Michel Foucault, he insists that in order to make sense of contemporary philosophy of mind one needs to realize that more is needed than a philosophical treatment of every individual argument on its own merits. One needs what philosophers outside the analytical tradition term a hermeneutical appraisal of the contemporary scene. The cultural and traditional assumptions operative in writing on the philosophy of mind can manifest their presence through literary style or rhetorical devices. One such “deceit” Searle identifies as the “heroic-age-of-science maneuver.”9 When some counterintuitive claim is made which appears to stretch our credulity beyond the limit, appeal is made to the great march of science in the past. We are made to feel that our insistence on our ability to know that we feel hunger, or that we think about some topic, against the insistence of the reductionist philosopher that we don’t, is simply a matter of our being intellectual Luddites, opposing the clear-sighted vision of some struggling Galileo or Newton!

6 7 8 9

Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., pp. 10–11. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 5.

24

Insight and Analysis

One influence behind the “flight from consciousness” evident in much analytical philosophy of mind has been that exerted by the later Wittgenstein. Although the Philosophical Investigations and other later writings are open to diverse interpretations, it seems clear that Wittgenstein urged a move away from the traditional philosophical concern with mental, intentional life. Accordingly, he suggested that first-person linguistic self-ascription was best interpreted on the analogy of shouts, or cries of pain, and not in terms of putative truth claims about inner conscious states. This Wittgensteinian “doctrine of avowals” is criticized by Searle as an inadequate account of much of our intentional experience. It is clear that there are many cases in which statements about being in pain are not much more than verbalized cries of pain, but there are many other cases in which claims about being in pain are more deliberate efforts to give a correct account of that which one is experiencing, or is conscious of. One can think of situations in which a doctor requires quite detailed information on the location, quality, and duration of some pain a patient is undergoing, and in order to answer the questions asked the patient may have to attend to his conscious sensations in a quite deliberate manner.10 Wittgenstein’s attacks on “philosophical psychology,” alongside the more overt behaviorism of Gilbert Ryle’s work, gave birth to a tradition in postwar Anglo-American philosophy that has developed in a number of ways. In the 1960s, Richard Rorty and Paul Feyerabend put forward versions of what has been termed “eliminative materialism.” On this view the analysis of linguistic behavior does not require some further analysis of the mental acts from which the linguistic phenomena emerge: quite simply there are no mental acts. Quine’s work has also been influential in persuading some philosophers that there is no mental fact of the matter beyond the fact of the verbal utterance. Indeed, Quine has given a “scientistic” twist to the attack on philosophical psychology that one finds in the later Wittgenstein. For Quine argues that there is no first philosophy over and above science which could give some purely philosophical analysis of the mental. Rather, epistemology is to become “naturalized”; it is to be an area in which science investigates the relation between the “torrential input” of sense experience, on the one hand, and our inferences based on this experience, on the other. An attempt at such scientific study of the mind is found in the various forms of “functionalism” which are current. The functionalist thesis proposes that

10 Ibid., pp. 146–147. J.L. Mackie offers criticisms similar to those made by Searle of Wittgenstein’s “doctrine of avowals.” See, Mackie, Logic and Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 35.

John Searle and Human Consciousness

25

stones and beer cans can be said to be mental if they can be made to perform the same computations as can the mind. The proponents of what Searle calls “strong Artificial Intelligence” hold that, since the computations which are done by the mind can be done by various mechanical systems, it is the study of such syntactically programmed systems that will serve to explain the nature of the mind. If various kinds of systems, even appropriately primed sets of stones and beer cans, can “use” a language, then the analysis of language-using systems will provide an explanation of mental life in which “consciousness” is irrelevant. How, then, would one deal with the phenomenon of consciousness? The solutions here range from eliminative materialism, which simply claims that we have no conscious mental states, to the kind of “instrumentalism” adopted by Daniel Dennett (talk of intentional states is “useful fiction” which helps us predict human behavior), to Paul Churchland’s program for the future reform of “folk psychology,” as science reveals the true nature of our mental occurrences. In response to this array of philosophical options, Searle expresses his opinions with a tone of exasperation which varies in accord with the degree to which their proponents appear happy to fly in the face of glaringly obvious facts. He admits that it is hard to know what to say to someone who claims that they are conscious of nothing, yet one should not shrink from pointing out the absurdity of that claim even when it is put forward in a manner which employs the up-to-the-minute jargon. Searle repeatedly insists on the obvious nature of our ability to advert to our mental states. Against Dennett, he points out that we do not simply use terms such as “hope,” “believe,” “desire” to predict human behavior without being able to know that there are such states via reference to our own mental life.11 Searle devotes some considerable space to assembling a number of arguments current in the literature against reductionist dismissals of consciousness. He sees the various arguments against the reductionist denial of consciousness as essentially coming back to the facts of the matter which are available to us as conscious individuals. Given that as conscious individuals we are aware of what it means to be “in pain” by reference to present or remembered experiences of pain, it follows that the word “pain” means both the facts of our conscious pain states and any neurophysiological account one may give of why one is in pain; the facts of consciousness remain, whatever further facts we may claim to know in verifying a scientific theory of, say, pain. In short, “. . . you can’t identify anything mental with anything nonmental,

11 Ibid., pp. 6–7.

26

Insight and Analysis

without leaving out the mental”12—or in Butler’s phrase, “A thing is what it is and not something else.” Paul Churchland and others suggest that the accounts of “folk psychology” which we have from first-person selfdescription will, like other every day accounts of the world given in the past, yield to scientifically substantiated theories of mind as science progresses. The fact that this seems counterintuitive is all to the good—so did every great advance in scientific knowledge. Searle argues, however, that there is a difference between the theories of common sense or older science about the world at large, and our first-person accounts of consciousness. Searle does not deny that “folk psychology” may include biased and erroneous elements, but in general one should recognize that beliefs and desires, unlike phlogiston and ether, are not simply postulated; rather, they are given in consciousness. Further, he makes the general, antireductive point that theories about people’s behavior at cocktail parties or about economic phenomena are not simply reducible to the laws of particle physics.13 It is Searle’s critique of “strong Artificial Intelligence” theories of mind that has proved the most controversial aspect of his work in recent years. In chapter 9 of The Rediscovery of Mind he summarizes some of his earlier arguments and develops them. He once again presents his “Chinese room” argument which is to the effect that syntax is not the same as semantics. That is to say, one can prime a system to follow rules concerning the manipulation of signs, but this does not necessarily entail that the system will have a semantic ability concerning the language which the signs make up. So the man in the Chinese room is handed Chinese symbols which he does not understand, but which he manipulates in accordance with rules in which he has been instructed. Searle argues that if there is no need to attribute conscious mental capacities to automated sheep selectors, answer phones and thermostats, a fortiori, there is no need to attribute such states to advanced electronic computers. He would agree with writers in the field of Artificial Intelligence that any physical system, stones, and beer cans can be used to function as a Turing machine. As the construction of Charles Babbage’s nineteenth-century calculating machine illustrates, there are many ways in which to build a computational system. Indeed, given the complexity of the physical world there are no doubt myriad instances in which circulating planets or subatomic particles “perform” as computational systems. But, the crucial point is that such systems are only computational insofar as someone interprets them as such. Searle writes that it is this point which has come to the fore in his thinking over the last 10 years. He writes,

12 Ibid., p. 39. 13 Ibid., pp. 60–61.

John Searle and Human Consciousness

27

. . . notions such as computation, algorithm, and program do not name intrinsic physical features of systems. Computational states are not discovered within physics, they are assigned to the physics.14

Searle claims that one repeatedly finds in the literature a mode of writing which attempts to describe a computational system while tacitly assuming an interpreting “homunculus” who “believes” and “understands” the information being processed. This is the case, he claims, with Jerry Fodor’s and Noam Chomsky’s theories of the language of the mind. Such deep language structure is supposed to be wired into the neurophysiology of the brain so as to cause our linguistic behavior. But what sense can we give to descriptions of language use as intelligent and reasonable other than through our awareness of our conscious reasonable operations? To talk of unconscious, brain manipulation of language is to postulate an interpretative “homunculus” at the level of brain physiology who “understands” and interprets the words of the putative, universal language. The situation is indeed ironic. In order to remove the subjective mystery of consciousness one attempts a “scientific” explanation of mind in terms of computational systems, such systems supposedly being able to accomplish the “understanding” characteristic of the mind. But, as Searle argues, any such system, as a manipulation of syntax, needs to be interpreted by an intelligent agent. How odd, then, that with Chomsky’s unconscious linguistic manipulation the intelligent agent is not even responsible for the interpretation of the syntax he uses! Do we not require a judicious application of Ockham’s razor to these multiplying homunculi? As I mentioned above, Searle’s book appears to be concerned more with criticizing philosophical opinions which would banish the phenomena of human consciousness than with a positive treatment of those phenomena. Searle does make some remarks on what he terms the “Network” and the “Background,” but does not go into any detail on these matters.15 Roughly speaking, the “Network” is the background of beliefs against which some present belief is intelligible, and the “Background” is the horizon, or “world” of intersubjective relations within which the person functions. However, Searle does make a few remarks on consciousness and self-consciousness which I think are of some importance, particularly as these address difficulties

14 Ibid., p. 211. The point that physical systems need to be interpreted as intelligent by an intelligent agent is one that was made by Hugo Meynell in an article criticizing the materialism of David Armstrong and U.T. Place. See Hugo Meynell, “The Mental and the Physical,” The Heythrop Journal 14 (1973), pp. 35–46. 15 See, The Rediscovery of Mind, pp. 80–81.

28

Insight and Analysis

with the notion of consciousness which go back to Hume’s objections to Descartes’ attempt to “look within.” Searle points out that the correct idea of introspection is not a “looking within.” Naturally, such a notion of inward looking is preposterous. Rather, one can be conscious of a number of items which are more or less central to one’s main focus of attention. So one may be peripherally aware of the pressure on one’s back as one sits writing, while one may be more focused upon what one is attempting to communicate. But one can shift one’s attention, and then that which was only peripheral in one’s consciousness becomes the main item of interest. In some such fashion, Searle argues, one is always “self-conscious.” The term can be a misleading one. One speaks of being “self-conscious” in the sense of being very much aware of what one is doing in the presence of others; one is, perhaps, embarrassed. In this sense one’s focus of attention is upon all the details of one’s conscious performance that one thinks under scrutiny. However, Searle observes that there is a sense in which one can be said always to be “self-conscious” in one’s waking state. For, one can shift attention from, say, a picture at which one is looking to one’s consciousness of looking at the picture. The ability of such shifts of attention manifests the fact that one is, peripherally at least, self-present in any conscious activity.16 However, Searle insists that such “self-awareness” is not self-knowledge, let alone incorrigible self-knowledge. One can be mistaken about one’s self as one can about other matters. A man may get irritated by foreign people in his neighborhood, and it may be clear to others that he really has a racist bias. However, he may rationalize or explain away the evidence, some of which is manifested to him in his own conscious states or moods.17 It would seem that the sort of self-discovery sought in psychotherapy has to do, in part, with items of which an individual may be conscious, but which the individual has not adverted to, or allowed himself to advert to in such a manner that particular questions concerning feelings and orientations are allowed to arise.

2. The Conscious Agent I have suggested that Searle makes some helpful observations concerning the way we are to understand introspection as a shift of attention, rather than as “inward looking.” He avoids the Humean error of understanding

16 Ibid., p. 143. 17 Ibid., p. 146.

John Searle and Human Consciousness

29

introspection as the nonsensical notion of an “inward look.” However, I should say that the weaknesses in Searle’s position have to do with his inability to move beyond another of Hume’s central errors concerning human consciousness. That is, Searle fails to treat adequately the human intelligent, reasonable, and responsible agent. There are, indeed, places where he appears to acknowledge such an agent, but then it is difficult to see how these apparent references are consistent with his overall view. Despite Searle’s insistence that there is an ontological level of conscious experience that is not reducible to anything else, he is committed to a form of biological naturalism. Throughout The Rediscovery of Mind he reiterates the point that the only viable alternative to a reduction of consciousness which would characterize it as a mere epiphenomenon, or to a Cartesian, spiritualistic dualism, is his own brand of biological naturalism. On that position the facts of conscious experience are given, and therefore the fact of conscious pain, for example, is just as real as any scientific explanation of pain may hope to be. But the “level” of consciousness does not have causal states that are intrinsic to it. It is, rather, caused by the neurophysiological activity of the brain. Searle maintains that this is the obvious conclusion to be drawn from what we know about the world in general and the neurophysiological basis of human intentionality, in particular. It is this version of biological naturalism that should calm the fears of those who believe that any acknowledgment of mental acts will inevitably lead to Cartesian spiritualism. On the one hand, then, Searle affirms, “Our conscious states have quite specific irreducible phenomenological properties;”18 and on the other hand he writes, “It seems to me obvious from everything we know about the brain that macro mental phenomena are all caused by lower-level micro phenomena.”19 On such a view, the conscious experiences I have of thinking, feeling, loving, deciding, and so on are none of them caused by me, but by something nonconscious. We have a view of consciousness here very close to that of Hume’s. For Hume there is no “I” or self-moving agent but a mere bundle of fleeting perceptions. However, as I noted above, there are one or two places in Searle’s argument where there is mention of the “agent.” It is perhaps significant that the passages in question occur precisely in the context of his argument against those who espouse some version of the “unconscious language of the brain” thesis. It will be recalled from the discussion above that Searle accuses the proponents of strong Artificial Intelligence and

18 Ibid., p. 28. 19 Ibid., p. 125.

30

Insight and Analysis

“language of the brain” of covertly slipping an intelligent, interpreting homunculus into the picture; for, clearly, the syntax of a language or computational system needs intelligent interpretation for the operations of anything like mind to occur. As opposed to the dumb mechanical operations of a machine, or of the neurophysiological level of the human being, The human computer consciously goes through the steps of the algorithm, so the process is both causal and logical: logical because the algorithm provides a set of rules for deriving the output symbols from the input symbols and causal because the agent is making a conscious effort to go through the steps.20 (Emphasis added.)

What is meant by the “agent” or by the agent’s causal efficacy is nowhere explored in Searle’s account. It seems that we have a passing recognition here of what Aristotle took to be the self-movement of rational agents, of a conscious operation in accord with a final cause. I do this thing or attend to this question because I choose such action as a value, and because I decide to act in accord with that value-judgment. In such cases I am conscious not only of a set of unrelated items, but of a causal self-movement. But how is such an, albeit passing, acknowledgment of the causal action of the agent consistent with Searle’s position that the level of consciousness has no causal properties of its own, but is, rather, caused in every way by the lower level of neurophysiological activity? His very acknowledgment of the self-moving agent occurs at a point in his argument where he insists that we require an intelligent homunculus to interpret the syntactical symbols of a computational system or language, and he insists that it is nonsensical to imagine a homunculus operating secretly on the level of neurophysiology. What his line of argument suggests, I think, is that the homunculus needs to be placed where the homunculus rightly belongs: on the level of the conscious, self-moving activity of the agent. For, as Searle maintains, computational systems are not discovered in physics but are assigned to physical systems. And no less is it the case that such systems are not discovered in the laws affirmed in neurophysiological theory, but may be assigned to the systems described in such theories. Just as beer cans and stones can function in computational systems, so can synapses and neuron paths. But in both cases one requires an intelligent and reasonable interpreter to give meaning to the syntax. I have asserted above that Searle gives little attention to the human agent, or person, in his or her intelligent, reasonable, and responsible activities. That is to say that Searle’s treatment of conscious intentionality does little by

20 Ibid., p. 220.

John Searle and Human Consciousness

31

way of investigating human cognition and the epistemological questions which arise in this area. In fact, in the earlier book, Intentionality, Searle put forward a position on knowing which he admitted was naive realist, or perceptualist.21 Given such naive realism, or what Richard Rorty terms “representationalism,” there is not much to say about the process by which the intentional agent comes to know something. For Searle, acts of perception directly inform us about that which we perceive as the cause of our perceptual experience.22 Needless to say, such uncluttered empiricism is highly controversial in contemporary epistemology. As Donald Davidson observes concerning Quine’s empiricism, such naive realism opens the way to a skepticism it is incapable of answering. For our “inner happenings” may not be caused in the right way by the objects “outside.”23 And beyond such skepticism, making it appear mild by comparison, there is the tradition of skepticism which runs from Hume through Kant and German idealism to contemporary postmodernism. In that tradition even the distinction between an “in-here” mind and an “out-there world” is called into question. In order to focus on the issue of the agent’s own consciousness of causal efficacy, as a constitutive factor within consciousness, I will briefly outline a theory of cognition, or knowledge, which is, I think, defensible.24 I think it can be argued that human knowing is a conscious process which involves activities such as attention to the data of sense and imagination; questions concerning the nature of those data, insights, conceptions, and hypotheses arrived at to answer such questions; further activities, such as marshalling and weighing the evidence in order to answer the further question as to whether one’s ideas or hypotheses are correct, true; and judgments as to the correctness, or probable correctness, of one’s insights. Of course, such a mere catalog of cognitional activities may appear banal and uninteresting, and one cannot in the present context hope to develop the philosophical positions implicit in the theory of knowledge which identifies such interrelated operations. However, one can give some indication of how the theory which identifies such mental activities may be verified. For if the reader of this text will attend to his or her mental operations in the process of reading, understanding, and agreeing or disagreeing, or even reserving judgment on,

21 Intentionality, pp. 222–223. 22 Ibid. 23 Donald Davidson, “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” in Dieter Henrich (ed.), Kant oder Hegel? (Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1983), pp. 423–438. 24 The outline is dependent upon Bernard Lonergan’s philosophy. See his Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1957), chapter XI.

32

Insight and Analysis

what has been written here, it should not be too difficult to discover the materials needed to verify the account. For the reader will have had some sensate experience of the marks on the page, or perhaps they will have heard them read aloud; they will have had some experience of either understanding or failing to understand what is written here, and will have asked questions about it; further, if they pursue the matter, they will have raised the question as to what they agree or disagree with in our argument and in our discussion of Searle’s work. In other words, the attempt to attack or revise the brief account of the interrelated mental activities involved in coming to know will involve the said activities of attending to data, asking questions in order to understand, understanding something, and raising questions as to the correctness of one’s understanding; and it will involve one in the further activities associated with judging as to the truth or falsity of what one has read, or refusing judgment because of the perceived lack of convincing evidence either way. My purpose in giving this very brief sketch of the cognitional elements involved in knowing is not to enter into a discussion of the shortcomings of the kind of naive realism or perceptualism Searle espouses, or of the way realism may be justified against the kind of skepticism which such naive realism is incapable of handling successfully.25 Rather, I wish to draw attention to ways in which the conscious agent is conscious of his or her self-movement, or selfcausation in coming to know. So one arrives at an insight, if one does, because one asks a question, and one is aware of the insight as an answer to one’s question. Further, one makes a judgment because one has asked a question as to the veracity of one’s insight, and also because one is aware of grasping a sufficiency of evidence. If one says that there is milk left in the fridge one is aware that this assertion is made because one sees the relevant evidence—the appropriately colored liquid in its normal container. One is conscious of making a judgment because of one’s grasp of the evidence. But beyond all this, one is self-moving in the more fundamental sense of choosing to follow through on some inquiry one has embarked on, and in choosing to be intelligent rather

25 Briefly, I would say that the kind of naive realism Searle professes overlooks the way in which arriving at a correct judgment is more than a matter of sensible experience. Rather, it is also a matter of understanding and judging with regard to our experience. Further, skeptics, no less than anyone else, are committed to the kind of cognitional activities I have sketched out above, in order to reasonably affirm their skepticism. And the judgment that one knows nothing, or that nothing is true, is incoherent, insofar as one is aware of putting forth such statements in a mental act, of judgment, which is to the effect that something is known, or that one knows something.

John Searle and Human Consciousness

33

than silly, and reasonable rather than rash. One is aware of causing oneself to attend to the issue in hand and to follow through on the demands of intelligence and reasonableness. One is aware that one does not have to do so, but, in fact, one moves oneself to do so. In the Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding Hume rightly points out that I do not directly perceive that my willing causes a particular picture to emerge in my imagination.26 It might be that God or something else always makes the image appear when I wish it to. But it is a different matter with my own attention to the picture or an idea. I am aware of attending to this or that image because I want to, because I grasp it as a value to do so, and because I will to act in accord with that value. One can observe the difference between one’s consciousness of the selfmovement involved in coming to know and to decide, and one’s consciousness of processes that are not on the level of human intelligent, reasonable, and responsible consciousness. So one might be troubled by a digestive upset. One lies in bed and is conscious of the various sounds of rumbling in one’s stomach and of the internal feelings of discomfort. In this instance one remains a “passive” locus of conscious experiences. One thinks that there is probably some causal connection between the various conscious experiences, but one is in no way conscious of these causal interactions. Such consciousness, then, is quite different from the consciousness of the subject, or agent, as intelligently and reasonably and responsibly self-moving. The reductionist can, then, be asked whether he puts forth what he says because he has been conscious of some “bumping” in his head, or because what he says has simply “welled up” within him, or whether, on the contrary, he puts forth his opinions because he is aware of consciously attending to the data on the issue, of asking questions and coming up with ideas about those data, and of making the judgments he makes because he consciously grasps the evidence as sufficient for his probable or definite conclusions. Further, is he or is he not also aware of telling us about those opinions because he thinks it worthwhile to do so? Of course his motives may be mixed, and it is always difficult to be sure of all our motives when we do something. But at least if the reductionist wanted to give the impression of making a reasoned argument he would have followed the demands of being intelligent and reasonable in constructing his arguments, and is he not then aware that he responded to the exigencies of his native intelligence and reasonableness because he wanted to appear intelligent and reasonable, rather than silly and rash?

26 David Hume, “On the Idea of Necessary Connection,” in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding (La Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 1988), pp. 113–118.

34

Insight and Analysis

If Searle demands that we recognize the ontological status of our conscious experiences, then he should be consistent in allowing that we can no less recognize the causal patterning intrinsic to the level of consciousness. In that case, talk of these conscious activities as being really caused by something else is no less acceptable than saying that conscious states of “belief” or “fear” or “hunger” are not what they appear to be in consciousness. Just as the causal account of cocktail party behavior and economic phenomena are not reducible to the laws of subatomic physics, so the causal laws of the self-constituting agent are no less irreducible. Indeed, we are in a privileged position as regards the latter. For as Searle points out, theories of consciousness can be verified by direct access, unlike theories which postulate entities such as ether or phlogiston to account for physical phenomena. Indeed, there is a way here that we can turn the whole reductionist strategy on its head. Searle does not really attempt the difficult yet necessary task of a full-scale treatment of the question of the interdependence of the sciences, or of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of reduction. His remarks on cocktail parties and economic phenomena being irreducible to, although clearly dependent upon, the laws of physics are ad hominem moves against reductionism which do, no doubt, succeed with all but the most hardened reductionist. But what about the latter fellow? A proper treatment of the issues involved would require a very thorough, large-scale treatment.27 A start would be to draw attention to the widespread skepticism prevalent in the field of contemporary philosophy of science. How is one to justify, against the skeptics in philosophy of science or in the postmodernist movement, that the laws of physics or of neurophysiology or anything else really succeed in getting at the truth about the world? At best, they are all perhaps useful fictions that are relative to some historical worldview or epoch. I think it may be argued that the only way beyond the impasse of subjectivist theories of science is along the lines of a general refutation of skepticism that convicts the skeptic of incoherence in his or her own account. In order to do this one has to draw attention to the skeptic’s consciousness of their own mental activity: of being conscious of making a truth claim, when they claim that nothing is known as true, or of being conscious of making a judgment, or knowledge claim, when claiming that they can reach no conclusions on

27 Again, I would refer the reader to Lonergan’s Insight in this regard (chapters I–IV); also to Philip McShane’s Randomness, Statistics and Emergence (Dublin and London: Gill and Macmillan, 1971).

John Searle and Human Consciousness

35

anything. From the refutation of skepticism in this way, one may move forward, by way of critically substantiating something like the account of coming to know sketched out above, to treat of the way scientific hypotheses are to be reasonably selected as more or less probable accounts of reality, of what is so. However, it will be noted that this whole strategy to rescue the reasonableness of claims to scientific objectivity rests upon factual knowledge of the conscious mental acts that the agent is aware of as causally interconnected. I would suggest, then, that if the hardheaded reductionist attempts to banish the reality of the conscious and cognitional he is not only flying in the face of fact, but is undermining the only successful strategy that I am aware of that would give a reasoned account of how and why it is that scientific claims about particle physics and neurophysiology may have something to tell us about reality.

3. Another Alternative to Descartes Searle’s biological naturalism is an attempt to reassure philosophers that they need not subscribe to Cartesian spiritualism and dualism if they take seriously the evident facts of conscious experience. It can be observed, however, that throughout the book the view that there may be something nonmaterial about the mind is attributed solely to Cartesian dualism. As such, the dualist position is characterized as the view that consciousness is intrinsically immaterial. Indeed, this seems to be a fair characterization of Descartes’ position. For identifying consciousness with rational thought, Descartes denied consciousness to animals and thought of them, rather, as mechanical systems. However, Searle ignores the alternative to Cartesianism offered by the Aristotelian-Thomist philosophical tradition. In that tradition, it is argued that it is not consciousness per se that is nonmaterial, but that it is the conscious intelligent, reasonable, and responsible activities proper to human beings that are in some sense independent of the material. Within the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition one finds, at least among some of its representatives, a view of human knowing that resists the representationalism, “mirroring,” or picture-thinking traditions in epistemology that have come in for a good deal of criticism in recent philosophical writing, within the analytical tradition and outside it. To grasp the intelligible “form,” or pattern, of, for example, a circle (what makes a circle “circular”) in the geometrical definition, “a series of coplanar points equidistant from the centre,” is to go beyond a simple picturing of a circle in the imagination. As Descartes observed, while one cannot imagine a thousand-sided object,

36

Insight and Analysis

one can understand it, and many of the “counterintuitive” elements in modern science serve to reinforce the notion that what can be mathematically understood may not necessarily be imaginable.28 If knowing something or understanding something are not instances of “picturing,” then they are better described in terms of a grasp of the intelligible “form” of the thing, and knowledge that this form is instantiated. If a material being exists, clearly, it must be instantiated in the empirical, material space-time domain. But if I understand, say, a plumbing system of an actual or imaginary city the intelligible form as it is in my mind is clearly not as it is, or might be, in its material instantiation. The fact that something can, so to speak, “exist in my mind,” without necessarily being instantiated in the space-time empirical domain, is the reason behind the position argued for within the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition that understanding “abstracts,” or is apart from, the material instantiations of the things understood. Otherwise, understanding an idea, or knowing a thing would be a literal, physical becoming of that thing, rather than an “intentional becoming” of the thing understood or known through the acts of understanding, and knowing that what one understands is actually so. On such bases are developed the arguments for the nonmaterial elements within human consciousness. This position differs from the Cartesian view in a number of important ways, one being that consciousness and immateriality are not synonymous. For in the Thomistic tradition “estimative powers” of some kind are also attributed to animals. While the brief remarks made here on the way Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophers argue for the immateriality of elements within human consciousness may seem somewhat sketchy, one might add a couple of points in favor of a sympathetic consideration of such an approach. First, as much recent philosophical writing testifies, it is extremely difficult to give a cogent philosophical account of what one means by the “material.” It is clear that the realities referred to in quantum mechanics are not sensible in the way that easily described sensibilia are. As Searle notes, the identification of the physical with the real is not some dictum of scientific methodology but is, rather, a philosophical tenet and one which is assumed rather than argued for. In Thomistic philosophy there is at least some

28 It is perhaps interesting to note that even an empiricist like Quine has observed that contemporary scientific theory implies that what we can visualize may give us no more than an “analogy” for understanding the elements verified in physics. He further observes that his own materialism is now a matter of “faith.” See the interview with Bryan Magee in Magee, Men of Ideas (London: BBC Publications, 1978), pp. 175–176.

John Searle and Human Consciousness

37

attempt to specify what is meant by the material as contrasted with the spiritual. In terms of a heuristic definition, (to make a start) one can suggest that the material is that from which intelligence abstracts in grasping an idea of possible relevance to perhaps numerous actual instantiations. Secondly, there are data which are, perhaps, better accounted for by theories which grant that there is an element to human consciousness which is not intrinsically linked to the empirical, or material. I am thinking here of the various psychical phenomena documented, and particularly of the large amount of data provided by research into the field of “near-death experiences.” The documentation of experiences of those resuscitated after heart failure and the like has steadily increased since Raymond Moody’s studies in the 1970s, and it is now reckoned that about two million Americans have undergone some such experience.29 Attempts to provide accounts of these experiences which fit within the framework of biological or other forms of reductionism fail to explain a number of salient features of these “out of the body” experiences. To name one: many of those who have undergone “near-death” experiences later report knowledge of objects, situations, or conversations between persons which occurred far away from the physical location in which their body was to be found during their “temporary death”; and in many instances such reports are confirmed by independent witnesses. For the philosopher of consciousness, such conscious experiences should be worthy of consideration. Indeed, there has been a respectable tradition of philosophers taking an interest in psychical phenomena (one thinks of Henry Sidgwick and C.B. Broad, for example). To draw attention to such phenomena is not simply to argue from religious conviction, although religious traditions do provide many of the interesting cases of the “paranormal.” The ignoring of the evidence provided by such experiences on the part of philosophers may very well be part of that “climate of opinion,” that cultural horizon, to which Searle himself draws attention. For he has felt constrained by his own experience in dialog and debate over the last few years to highlight the nature of the cultural horizon within which philosophers operate. Such attention to the cultural Network and Background of groups of philosophers invites one to put the question to Searle himself as to whether or not he would be open to consider some of the philosophical alternatives to both Cartesianism and biological naturalism we have mentioned in this chapter. For surely,

29 For an example of recent work in this area see: Melvin Morse, M.D., Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children (New York: Villard Books, 1990).

38

Insight and Analysis

while it is the philosopher’s task to indicate the way a set of cultural presuppositions is an inevitable part of an individual’s intellectual approach to any problem, it is at the same time part of the philosophical task to point the way beyond the “cave” of a set of cultural assumptions which may blind one to the possibility of intelligent and reasonable alternatives.

Chapter 3

MacIntyre, Critical Realism, and Animal Consciousness In his book Dependant Rational Animals, Alasdair MacIntyre complements the positions on human social ethics he had argued for in his earlier works After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? with an analysis of the importance of human fragility and the implications of this for our ethical vision. He finds that the stress on an ethics of human vulnerability and dependency on others is more evident in the natural law account of Christian philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinas than it is in ancient writers such as Aristotle; although it is true that the ethics of the later philosopher in placing emphasis on the animal underpinnings of human nature, and upon ethics as intrinsically social build upon the thought of the earlier philosopher. MacIntyre, then, lays emphasis “. . . upon the vulnerability and disability that pervade human life, in early childhood, in old age and during those periods when we are injured or physically or mentally ill, and the extent of our consequent dependence upon others.”(MacIntyre, 1999, p. 155) He then proceeds to an account of what virtues we must cultivate in order to be both a contributor to human wellbeing and a recipient of the care and concern of others. In so doing, he throws light upon the ways in which recent writing on ethics, from the feminist perspective among others, can help us to appreciate further what is already there in the natural law ethics of Aquinas concerning the ethics of human vulnerability. While these ethical themes are the primary focus of the book, several chapters are, however, devoted to the question of how like and unlike human knowing and moral reasoning is to that of the higher animals. Such a discussion is to MacIntyre’s purpose as he wishes to emphasize both the aspects of physical dependency and of communality that we have in common with animals. These aspects are highlighted in the Aristotelian-Thomist ethical tradition but somewhat obscured in other philosophical traditions which lay greater stress on the apparently nonphysical aspects of human being. However, one has the impression that MacIntyre’s discussion of the similarities between human and animal reasoning constitutes a philosophical subplot in its own right, since his survey of both the relevant literature in animal psychology and the treatment of animal knowing in recent analytical and continental philosophy is extensive, and a good deal of the book is devoted to the arguments on the issues involved.

40

Insight and Analysis

While I have nothing but admiration for the ethical discussion of the work, I do have questions concerning the way MacIntyre handles the treatment of animal reasoning and its similarity and dissimilarity to human knowing and reasoning. While I agree with many points he makes in his discussion, and share his “high doctrine” of animal knowing (a Thomistic doctrine) I wish to point out that there are ambiguities which emerge from his treatment which he does not resolve. I will suggest that such matters can be clarified if we turn to the work of Bernard Lonergan and therefore I will devote some space below to a discussion of Lonergan’s position on animal consciousness.

1. “High” and “Low” Doctrines of Animal Knowing No serious philosopher, as far as I know, would hold that when we see a lion stalking a wilder beast, the lion is not taking his time in order to bring about a strategy for capture but is, rather, taking his time because he is having a crisis of conscience, that he is deliberating and asking himself if there are good moral reasons why he should or should not kill the other animal. However, from the anecdotal knowledge of common sense, and of animal trainers and of animal psychologists it seems evident that in the case of higher animals like chimps, dogs, and dolphins we humans have much in common with these other conscious beings. And for the sentimentalist and animal rights advocate of a certain persuasion the idea is advanced that there is no species difference at all. Where, then, do we draw the line between animal and human knowing and animal and human acting for ends? MacIntyre would, clearly, draw the line in such a way as to allow a good deal more by way of animal intelligence and intentional purposiveness than many recent philosophers who have written on the subject. For one thing, MacIntyre points out, philosophers tend to lump together various kinds of animals when discussing the issues whereas they should be more attentive to the data assembled by recent researchers who indicate high levels of sophistication in the rational abilities of such animals as dolphins, dogs, and chimpanzees. The work on dolphins by Louis M. Herman and others indicates not only sophisticated abilities for intersubjective interaction and communal cooperation among these animals, but shows that they are capable of beliefs which identify, classify, and discriminate between objects and states of affairs. Donald Davidson, among a number of analytical philosophers, has argued that animals do not have beliefs as they do not have anything like human language. MacIntyre counters that we have evidence that dogs and dolphins have recognitional capacities that are quite fine-grained. Further,

MacIntyre, Critical Realism, and Animal Consciousness

41

they do participate in various kinds of vocal and visual sign-language and, in addition, when dolphins have been taught a system of acoustic signs by trainers, they can respond to new combinations of the sounds learnt (MacIntyre, 1999, p. 51). Clearly, the recognitional capacities are prior to the acoustic language learnt. Dolphins, and other higher animals, also pursue ends and, according to researchers, dolphins can modify or correct their actions in such a way as to bring about a given end, fishing for instance, more effectively. Such animals can also conceal information, through feints or ruses of body language or sound signs, and be wary of the tricks of other animals (see MacIntyre, 1999, p. 57). Such intentional activity is evident when I play with my Labrador dog, Bella. Like a skillful footballer she can trick with a feint as she evades my attempts to take the ball off her. She can also recognize my attempts at countermoves involving a feint to left or right. MacIntyre also points out that such animals take emotional pleasure in the successful performance of deeds. And he writes, When Aristotle says that there is pleasure in all perceptual activity (Nicomachean Ethics X 1174b 20–21) and that pleasure supervenes upon the completed activity (22–23), what he asserts seems to be as true of dolphins as of human beings . . . (MacIntyre, 1999, p. 26)

Among continental philosophers, Heidegger wrote on the impoverishment of the mental life of animals. MacIntyre finds Heidegger’s discussion wanting in two principal respects. First, he chooses, as his example of an animal, a lizard, thereby sidestepping a discussion of how higher animals are more akin in their conscious lives to human beings than lower animals or perhaps “intermediate animals” such as a lizard (MacIntyre, 1999, p. 45). Secondly, Heidegger holds that animals have no notion of the thing “as such”; that is they seem to lack the ability of conceptual abstraction (MacIntyre, 1999, Chapter 5). However, the work of researchers on the psychology of higher animals gives every indication that this is not so. Again, I would relate an anecdote from my own experience of my dog Bella to support MacIntyre’s contention in this regard. When my Labrador Bella runs out of the house and I say “cats” she tends to run in one direction in the courtyard at the front of the house, and when I say “horses” she runs to the back garden to a wall over which she can see horses in the field belonging to the people who live behind us. One might think that she just learnt to run in one direction because that was the “cat direction” and in another because that was the “horse direction.” But on one occasion some people put horses in the field which is on the other side of the hedge at the bottom of our garden. On that day when I let her out and called out “horses Bella” she

42

Insight and Analysis

ran not to the wall, to look over at the horses regularly feeding there, but to the bottom of the garden to peer through the hedge at the new horses in a field separate from that over the wall. She repeated these variations on the response to the “horses” command. Clearly, she had the concept “horse” in such a way that it was “abstracted” from a given environment in which it was learnt initially. MacIntyre sums up his high doctrine of animal rationality writing of research on dolphins that shows they not only have, “. . . powers of perception, perceptual attention, recognition, identification and reidentification, but also of having and exhibiting desire and emotion, of making judgments, of intending this and that, of directing their action towards ends that constitute their specific goods and so having reasons for acting as they do” (MacIntyre, 1999, p. 27). At one end of the spectrum of views on animal knowing in the philosophical tradition stands Descartes, at the other end, according to MacIntyre is Aquinas. Descartes’ view that animals are machines that lack consciousness is, for MacIntyre, patently absurd. But many recent analytical and continental philosophers have not moved sufficiently far away from the minimal or low doctrine of animal reasoning Descartes’ position represents. One recent contributor to the debate, who combines a Thomist perspective with a penchant for linguistic analysis of a particular stripe, is Anthony Kenny. However, MacIntyre finds Kenny’s position inadequate when compared to that of Aquinas himself. Kenny believes that a creature that lacks language cannot give a reason, and if one cannot give a reason one cannot act for a reason. Therefore, animals do not act for reasons (MacIntyre, 1999, p. 53).1 MacIntyre observes that Kenny admits to adding the linguistic requirement himself and that it does not appear in quite that fashion in Aquinas. The point made by Aquinas that Kenny finds crucial for the discussion is found in De Veritate where Aquinas writes, Judgment is in the power of someone judging to the extent that one can pass judgment on one’s own judging; for whatever is in our power is something about which we can make a judgment. But to pass judgment on one’s own judgment belongs only to reason . . . (De Veritate 24, 2)

Here MacIntyre is in agreement with Kenny. A point which is reiterated in the book is that what is distinctive about human rationality is its reflexive capacity. MacIntyre writes, “Human practical rationality certainly has among its distinctive features the ability to stand back from one’s initial

1 The discussion to which MacIntyre refers is found in Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind (London: Routledge, 1993) , p. 82.

MacIntyre, Critical Realism, and Animal Consciousness

43

judgments about how one should act and to evaluate them by a variety of standards” (MacIntyre, 1999, p. 54). However, by waving the magic wand of “language” at the philosophical problem Kenny does not explain what is at issue. Although this is often done in this case by linguistic philosophers, MacIntyre observes, one needs to inquire further what capacity it is that is expressed or actualized in human language which gives its human specificity. One could imagine animal languages which have a certain complexity, he continues, but which would fall short of the complexity required for the actualization of the human capacity to reflect back upon one’s beliefs and judgments in order to evaluate their reasonableness. Turning to Aquinas’ position, MacIntyre notes that the key for St. Thomas is a hermeneutic of analogy; in an analogical way we can say that animals have “something like” or “akin” to reason and acting for reasons. Thus, Aquinas follows Aristotle in saying that animals are “moved by precepts”; they make “natural judgments” according to St. Thomas; they also exhibit “a semblance of reason” and share in “natural prudence” (MacIntyre, 1999, p. 55). From this discussion of Kenny’s oversights regarding Aquinas’ position on animal rationality, then, the fundamental features of MacIntyre’s view of animal consciousness and rationality emerge. First, we can say, given the scientific research on the abilities of animals such as dogs, chimps, and dolphins that there is an analogical resemblance between animal reason and our own—a position taken in the tradition by Aquinas. Secondly, this rationality of higher animals, which is a prelinguistic capacity to some extent, is distinguished from human rationality insofar as the latter includes a reflexive capacity. This reflexive capacity, the ability to provide reasons, or assess in terms of reasons one’s prior judgments develops with human linguistic growth. He writes, . . . for us human beings it is because we do have reasons for action prior to any reflection, the kind of reason we share with dolphins and chimpanzees, that we have an initial matter for reflection, a starting point for that transition to rationality which a mastery of some of the complexities of language use can provide. Did we not share such reasons with dolphins and chimpanzees we would not have arrived at that starting point and a denial that we have such reasons would render the transition to specifically human rationality unintelligible. (MacIntyre, 1999, p. 56)

This transition to reflexive rationality, human giving of reasons, takes place gradually in childhood. Human infants, like dolphins, have prelinguistic reasons for actions, and the complexity of the relationships between the goods that they pursue and the

44

Insight and Analysis means they adopt in order to achieve them matches that exhibited by dolphin reasoning. But they go beyond the reasoning characteristic of dolphins when they become able to reflect on and pass judgment on the reasons by which they have hitherto been guided. (MacIntyre, 1999, pp. 56–57)

The schema MacIntyre suggests, then, is clear: there are type A judgments and beliefs shared by both higher animal and humans and there are type B judgments and beliefs shared by humans alone. Type B judgments are rational evaluations of type A judgments. Gradually, human individuals develop in such a way as to acquire the linguistic ability to make type B judgments about type A judgments. Before I turn to examine something of what Bernard Lonergan has to say on animal knowing and its relation to human rationality, I will point to the problems which I believe arise for MacIntyre’s schema. To begin with, I would agree that we need to attend to the capacities which are exercised in language and which may be prior to language in their exercise or at least in their presence as dispositions. In this regard I think that an increasing number of analytical philosophers are moving away from the rather simplistic move of bringing in “language” as an answer without further elaboration in the way Kenny does in his discussion. So, for instance, Michael Dummett argues that growth in knowledge is genuine increase in novel understanding, it is not just some nominalistic rearranging of the chess pieces of ordinary discourse.2 I agree with MacIntyre that we must attend to the capacity manifest in the language which may become manifest or be actualized through language growth. However, while I agree with St. Thomas’ strategy of analogical understanding of animal consciousness on the basis of human consciousness,

2 Kenny’s resistance to the philosophical option of investigating the conscious, intentional acts or operations embodied in language is typical of a type of analytical philosophy which is now rather out of fashion. The literature of analytical philosophers who engage in the study of mental acts is vast and growing. In this regard, the influence of Michael Dummett has been important, but other philosophers in the analytical tradition such as John Searle, Sydney Shoemaker, Roderick Chisholm, Christopher Peacocke, and Gareth Evans have played a significant role in drawing the attention of analytical philosophers to the importance of conscious acts once again. On Dummett’s position see, Andrew Beards, “Dummett: Philosophy and Religion,” in R. Auxier and L. Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, The Library of Living Philosophers, ( La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2007), pp. 889–899. On this, one can usefully consult the “State of the Nation” essay on current analytical philosophy, “Past the Linguistic Turn?” by the present Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University, Timothy Williamson, in Brian Leiter (ed.), The Future of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

MacIntyre, Critical Realism, and Animal Consciousness

45

I would also warn that analogy can be a tricky business. It is not always easy to see when what is really dissimilarity has been taken to be a similarity between the terms of comparison. We can perhaps be warned here if we think of the growth of plants, which we take it do not have consciousness. A plant growing in a room attempting to reach sunlight by putting out its shoots in one direction may fail to reach its objective and then succeed by taking another route to the window. We can see here the danger of anthropomorphism if we were to push too far the idea of the plant saying “yes” to this direction of growth and “no” to the other failed route. When we turn to the phenomenon of “deceit” or withholding information, again we can think of examples of both land and sea plant life in which there are instances of “cunning” camouflage and deception in attempts to lure prey or to protect the plant from predators. I am not suggesting that the research on higher animals to which MacIntyre draws our attention is flawed by anthropomorphism, rather I too would hold for the higher doctrine of animal consciousness; but the slide into anthropomorphic projection lurks as a danger in interpretation. Where I do think that MacIntyre himself may have stepped over the mark is in talking of the prelinguistic judgments of dolphins and small infants as reasoning. At the very least he owes us an explanation of how reasoning in type B judgments is intrinsically different from reasoning in any and all type A judgments. How is a judgment or belief about a judgment or belief different from the object to which it refers? If it is only different insofar as it is second order, that is, insofar as it is about another judgment or belief, how does that make it qualitatively different from the judgment/belief to which it refers? Thus, to label judgment/belief type A reasoning and type B reasoning blurs the distinction between the two. Yet in his endorsement of Aquinas’ statement in De Veritate, and in passages throughout the book MacIntyre writes of the second order activity as involving rational, reasonable assessment of type A judgments/beliefs that is of a type which does not occur in those judgments/beliefs themselves. I do therefore think that Kenny is onto something when he argues that animals do not give reasons, if by “reasons” we mean the expressions of specifically human intelligent and rational operations. Kenny weakens his position, however, by invoking the great “mystery” of ordinary language just at the point at which he needs to answer questions about just what ordinary human language expresses that makes it so distinctive. In examining Lonergan’s contribution in the section below, I hope to throw a little more light on this area. A principal point to emerge from that discussion will be that MacIntyre’s schema is inadequate. Rather, what we

46

Insight and Analysis

need are type A, B, and C judgments/beliefs, where A are animal type “judgments” (shared by both higher animal and humans); B are the reasonable judgments made by human beings about the world around them and themselves from early childhood on; and C are the reflexive judgments made by human beings assessing the adequacy of their epistemological and moral positions, these reflexive judgments being no different qualitatively, in their reasonable or rational quality, from type B.

2. Lonergan on the Consciousness of Humans and Animals Lonergan’s discussion of Animal consciousness occurs in two related contexts: that of metaphysics and that of cognition and epistemology. In his analysis of metaphysical supervenience, in the terms of the probability of the emergence of schemes of recurrence and individuals, Lonergan includes a discussion of the specificity of animal functioning as conscious. In the area of cognition, Lonergan is preoccupied with animal knowing insofar as it exemplifies an extroverted engagement with reality akin to human cognition as this occurs in the “world of immediacy.” Such a world is that inhabited by human beings in early infancy, before they begin to move into a “world” mediated by meaning and motivated by value. However, as animal in part human persons never abandon the world of immediacy entirely, and the fact that human consciousness is a flow which always includes, among other elements, a biological patterning and a properly intelligent and rational patterning means that the task of differentiating the animal aspects of human knowing from the properly rational aspects is truly daunting. On Lonergan’s view the hermeneutic task of identifying and differentiating these strands in consciousness is crucial for the resolution of key problems in epistemology and philosophy in general. Since what we share with animals in terms of the biological pattern of conscious experience is more readily identifiable than the elements involved in the specifically human phases of our intelligence, reason, and moral deliberation, the age-old philosophical error is to describe the latter in the language appropriate to the former, animal aspects of consciousness. Turning to Lonergan’s metaphysical interest in animal consciousness first, it can be observed that his metaphysical analysis is intimately related to the positions argued for in cognition and epistemology as its base. However, in a chapter such as this, my aim is not to present an argument for the position on metaphysics, nor is it to argue in any detail for the validity of Lonergan’s basic stance on epistemology. Rather, I wish simply to point to his contributions to the discussion on animal and human knowing and indicate something of their explanatory efficacy for the issues involved.

MacIntyre, Critical Realism, and Animal Consciousness

47

Lonergan’s doctrine of animal consciousness would, I think, qualify as “high” according to MacIntyre’s classification of philosophical viewpoints. Further, Lonergan would also follow Aquinas’ position of understanding animal rationality on the analogy of human rationality. He writes, . . . if we endeavour to understand the sudden twists and turns both of fleeing quarry and pursuing beast of prey, we ascribe to them a flow of experience not unlike our own. (Lonergan, 1957, p. 182)

Like MacIntyre Lonergan also acknowledges that higher animals are capable of “deceit” and conscious subterfuge, “. . . the effective environment of a carnivorous animal is a floating population of other animals that move over a range of places and are more or less well equipped to deceive or elude their pursuers”(Lonergan, 1957, p. 182). In the course of his discussion of the explanatory metaphysics of genus and species, Lonergan examines the way animal consciousness adds a dimension of explanatory supervenience over and above that found in plant life. On Lonergan’s view, a metaphysics of supervenience is explanatory insofar as it can identify higher integrations supervening upon lower manifolds of data, these higher integrations providing explanations of why the totality of data acts as it does; an explanation not had by remaining on the lower level of the relevant data, the systematic changes among which is a matter of mere coincidence without the positing of the higher, explanatory entity. The levels of reality studied by the diverse sciences of, say, physics, chemistry, biology, sensitive psychology, and intentionality analysis are characterized by schemes of recurrence of events, which can, upon investigation, be assigned probabilities of their emergence, continuance, and decline. Thus, a given ecological environment is the result of the coming together of numerous factors, numerous schemes or cycles of recurrence, and this environment can be the occasion of the emergence of a new animal species which takes advantage of its resources. Further, higher entities which systematize the relative, merely coincidental fields of the acts of lower entities manifest greater complexity in terms of plasticity and adaptability. As one ascends the escalator of life, so to speak, one finds entities and schemes of recurrence which are dispositions for further entities and schemes of recurrence, but the higher one ascends the more differentiated and flexible are those dispositions as concrete opportunities. Thus, Lonergan writes of an . . . increasing liberation of serial possibilities from limitations and restrictions imposed by previous realizations. Plants and, still more so, animals function, not in this or that scheme of recurrence, but in any of ever increasing ranges of schemes of recurrence. (Lonergan, 1957, pp. 268–269)

48

Insight and Analysis

Animals, then, are intelligible solutions to problems of living and exploiting a series of interconnected probable schemes creating an environment. In a way that echoes Popper’s view of animals, Lonergan thus sees the animal as a solution to the problem of how to exploit a given environment. Since it is the case that an animal constitutes a more differentiated systematization of lower dispositions, of lower coincidental manifolds, Lonergan is led to make some prescriptive remarks concerning a truly scientific zoology in terms of animal psychology. He writes, . . . the animal pertains to an explanatory genus beyond that of the plant; that explanatory genus turns on sensibility; its specific differences are differences of sensibility; and it is in differences of sensibility that are to be found the basis for differences of organic structure, since that structure, as we have seen, possesses a degree of freedom that is limited but not controlled by underlying materials and outer circumstances. (Lonergan, 1957, pp. 265–266)

While a hermeneutic of inquiry dominated by atomistic picture-thinking may lead one to want to study animals in a merely descriptive way in terms of observable characteristics, and while work on the psychological differentiations of animals may be more demanding, Lonergan argues that it is the latter, rather than the descriptive kind of enquiry, which constitutes truly scientific zoology. Such antibehaviorist and antireductionist views of animal psychology and consciousness perhaps anticipated the approach to animal psychology of Konrad Lorenz. The researchers in the field whose work is generously surveyed by MacIntyre are of this post-Lorenzian generation. In accord with his position on the greater flexibility of the higher relative to the lower order in things, we can also say that for Lonergan, animal consciousness manifests a certain degree of “freedom,” or indeterminacy vis-à-vis its biological conditions. Thus, for Lonergan, animals also participate to varying degrees in, what he terms, the “aesthetic pattern” of experience or consciousness: “for kittens play and snakes are charmed” (Lonergan, 1957, p. 184). Again, it would seem Lonergan would endorse MacIntyre’s “high doctrine” of animal consciousness in as much as the higher animals, at least, manifest behavior betokening emotional satisfaction and desire, and the affectivity and aggresivity characteristic of intersubjective emotions. What they do on a particular occasion is not totally determined by the demands of lower biological exigencies. Thus, as my wife Tina learnt when taking Bella to dog training, dog trainers benefit greatly from the psychological studies of dog behavior. Such studies witness to the facts concerning the way dogs are pack animals, and their psychological reactions have a function which can be understood in terms of the probabilities of survival of the group. All that is true and is of

MacIntyre, Critical Realism, and Animal Consciousness

49

help in understanding what Bella does on the occasion of a particular stroll in the garden on a particular day. However, to understand the particular story of her actions at a particular time and place the general laws of evolutionary psychology are necessary but not sufficient. On this particular occasion Bella strolls into the garden because she wants an entertaining change from sleeping by the fire. She sniffs around a little and enjoys surveying the valley from her vantage point on the wall. She then notices her ball and string and plays with that awhile until her attention is caught by the stick she brought back from a walk and she decides to chew that for 10 minutes. Her “choice” of different, emotionally satisfying ends during this period is in part because of the biological underpinnings of Labrador psychology. But why she does this and now that is also because of her “whims,” her desires for pleasure and satisfaction in doing this and now that, and then perhaps in coming into the house in order to receive some affection from her mistress. She acts consciously for ends to which she is consciously attracted. A point not made by Lonergan but congruent with his analysis is that both human beings and animals move from a world of immediacy in early infancy to a socially mediated world as they develop. The object perused by the bleary-eyed new born puppy later becomes an object to be pursued or avoided, as the growing animal follows the directions communicated through the sound or body language of parents or older siblings. Such social mediation is, however, not the same as the social mediation which occurs in the case of developing human beings as they respond to, and assimilate, the meanings and values (and indeed failures in meaning and disvalues) of older human beings. Lonergan attempts to provide a phenomenology of the “biological pattern,” as he calls it, of consciousness which is shared both by us and the higher animals. Of this patterning of the stream of consciousness he writes in the following way: Outer senses are the heralds of biological opportunities and dangers. Memory is the file of supplementary information. Imagination is the projection of courses of action. Conation and emotion are the pent-up pressure of elemental purposiveness. Finally, the complex sequence of delicately co-ordinated bodily movements is at once the consequence of striving and a cause of the continuous shift of sensible presentations. (Lonergan, 1957, pp. 182–183)

A further basic characteristic of the “biological pattern” is what Lonergan calls “extroversion.” This is a key notion for Lonergan when he comes to differentiate properly human knowing from the knowing we share with higher animals. For properly human knowing aims at and achieves knowledge

50

Insight and Analysis

of reality, being, mediately through the process of attention to the data, questioning and understanding the data and affirming one’s understanding of the data to be true or false of reality, in rational judgment. Philosophy takes a wrong track, however, when it overlooks what is specific to this intelligent and rational process and takes what is common to human and animal knowing as all there is to be said about human knowing. Empiricist and intuitionist myths of knowing as simply looking or immediate sensation follow. Of this extroversion in the consciousness of humans and higher animals Lonergan writes, This extroversion is a basic characteristic of the biological pattern of experience. The bodily basis of the senses in sense organs, the functional correlation of sensations with the positions and movements of the organs, the imaginative, conative, emotive consequences of sensible presentations, and the resulting local movements of the body, all indicate that elementary experience is concerned, not with the immanent aspects of living, but with its external conditions and opportunities . . . It is this extroversion of function that underpins the confrontational element of consciousness itself. Conation, emotion, and bodily movement are a response to stimulus; but the stimulus is ever against the response . . . (Lonergan, 1957, pp. 183–184)

From this account of the extroversion characteristic of the consciousness we share with higher animals it follows that Lonergan would be in agreement with MacIntyre that animal consciousness lacks that reflexivity, the ability to turn from the other to self, which is achieved in human rational consciousness. However, as we shall see further below, this is in no way the full story with regard to the differences between human knowing and animal knowing. We have seen above that MacIntyre suggests that we make judgments about what is the case and about what is the morally good thing to do in the same way as the higher animals do. The difference is that as we develop in our linguistic abilities we can actualize a capacity for critical reflection upon our prior factual and moral judgments in a way animals cannot. Lonergan’s acceptance of a “high doctrine” of animal consciousness would entail that his position supports MacIntyre’s contention that we share, and continue to share as we develop, a consciousness which is common both to us and to higher animals. Of the “judgments” and orientations to ends which characterize such consciousness we can speak in an analogical way when describing them as similar in some respects to properly human, rational, and moral acts. However, the oversight in such an account, it was claimed above, is that it does not distinguish with any clarity between the moral and factual “judgments” we share with animals and the kind of moral

MacIntyre, Critical Realism, and Animal Consciousness

51

and factual judgments specific to human rationality and responsibility. Therefore, the analogy becomes blurred between the terms being compared and contrasted, since MacIntyre cannot give us a definite idea of how animal “rationality” is different from human rationality. To refer to the reflexive ability of linguistically articulate human beings to provide rational assessment of their prior judgments is not sufficient in this regard, since nothing more is provided by way of an explanation of how these reflexive judgments upon prior judgments are rational in a way the prior judgments are not. Lonergan’s account of cognition, which includes a phenomenology of rational and moral judgment does, however, provide a way forward in this discussion. The kind of analogous “judgment” common to those who share the “biological pattern” of consciousness, human and higher animals, is virtually that outlined in the Kantian and positivist accounts of judgment as a “filling of the empty categories of time and space.” Of course when this occurs in the case of animal consciousness we are not thinking of the mere appearance of an object on a passive receptor screen. Rather, we are thinking of the appearance of an object toward which there may be strong reactions of desire or repulsion on the part of the recipient. The object will be invested with the emotional and conative attraction of the interested and engaged subject. So when, like other animals, I dodge out of the way of an oncoming cricket ball I certainly have a strong interest in doing so. A phenomenological account of the shift from the world of mere immediacy of the young human infant to the sophistication of a 3- or 4-year-old as they enter further into the world mediated by meanings and the values of the human community is far from easy. We can readily grant that the small baby’s reaching out for her mother’s breast, and her satisfaction in finding the object of her desire is a fairly clear case of extroverted immediacy of the subject to object. But when we move on to examine such capacities which are now second nature to both adults and not a few 7-year-olds, like tying one’s shoelaces, or skipping up three steps at once, we have already moved into a consciousness that is informed by the learning process. Thus the difficulties of getting right the analogy between the consciousness of higher animals and that of human beings. The point is that many of these simple judgments of childhood have already moved beyond the “judgments” of biological consciousness, the “judgments” of the desire-oriented subject to an object that is presented or is sought, to a properly rational form of human judgment. How then do we characterize these latter to distinguish them from the “biological consciousness judgments” which Kant and the positivists mistook for genuinely rational human judgment?

52

Insight and Analysis

According to Lonergan’s analysis such human judgments are a matter of seeking and achieving sufficient reason, sufficient evidence for an affirmative or negative answer (certain or, more usually, probable). Such judgments are, then, answers to “is it so?” questions, or, in the moral sphere, “is it truly good, worthwhile?” questions. The reasoning process heading toward judgment involves gathering and weighing the relevant evidence, and it involves a conscious rational grasp of a conditioned (the prospective proposition), the links between that conditioned and its conditions, and that the conditions are fulfilled in the data. Thus, to make a rational judgment about whether there is a computer in that office over there, I need to understand what the conditions are for something to be a computer (so that I understand the prospective proposition), and then I need to grasp intellectually that the relevant data of my sense experience give the fulfillment, or not as the case may be, of the specified conditions. Such elements are consciously operative in the reasoning processes of quite small children although, of course, very few of us even as adults come to advert to them and give an explicit account of them. As Lonergan writes, Having the sense experience is the fulfilment, but if you just have the fulfilment without any idea of a conditioned or the link between conditioned and conditions, you’re an animal, you’re not yet on the level of judgment. In other words, the sense experience is decisive insofar as it is within the context that’s thinking of a conditioned, a link between conditioned and conditions, and fulfilment of the conditions. Sense experience as such has nothing to do with it. Sense experience becomes fulfilment of conditions within a context. It acquires that significance within the context. That context is absent in the animal and present in the human being. (Lonergan, 2001, pp. 339–340)

For Lonergan, therefore, the distinction to be identified in our consciousness between what we have in common with higher animals and that which is specific to human intelligent, reasonable, and responsible operations is one which we are constitutionally prone to overlook. Yet such a distinction is vital in a hermeneutics of the various stands taken on cognition throughout the philosophical tradition. Identifying these “two realisms” operative in the conscious orientations of human persons should not be a prelude to denigrating either of them. But it is essential if myths about knowing are to be avoided and a critical realism adumbrated which can handle the objections to objective knowing thrown up by idealisms and skepticism parasitic upon the misconceived versions of epistemology devised by empiricism, naïve realism, and intuitionism. Lonergan writes, . . . for the realism of the extroverted animal is no mistake, and the realism of rational affirmation is no mistake. The trouble was that, unless two distinct

MacIntyre, Critical Realism, and Animal Consciousness

53

and disparate types of knowing were recognized, the two realisms were incompatible. For rational affirmation is not an instance of extroversion, and so it cannot be objective in the manner proper to the “already out there now” . . . The attempt to fuse disparate forms of knowing into a single whole ended in the destruction of each by the other . . . (Lonergan, 1957, p. 414)

A phenomenology of human and animal knowing, on Lonergan’s view, would stress the similarity between the “intuitions” of higher animals and the “elementary insights” of human beings. Indeed, Lonergan remarks, were there not further complex and differentiated conscious human acts one would conclude that there is an identity between these human and animal intuitions (Lonergan, 1990, pp. 313–315). Both Bella and my 22-month-old son Benedict have learnt the concept “horse.” Further complex and differentiated conscious human activities of understanding, judging, and deciding, articulated most evidently in language, are the unfolding of noetic acts which from the outside, so to speak, might seem no different from animal intuitions, elementary “insights.” The differences in sensitive psychology between higher animals and humans are already a springboard for these further differences in rational and evaluative consciousness. Here Lonergan draws attention to the work of Wolfgang Köhler, done in the 1950s, on chimpanzees, and points out that Köhler’s work shows the relative inflexibility of the mental imagery of chimps when compared with human children. Whether Köhler’s work in this area has been superseded or improved upon would be a question to put to animal psychologists, but the point made by Lonergan with regard to human and animal imaginal consciousness in discussing Köhler’s work would be hard to contest. That is, human children possess powers of imagining beyond that of higher animals, and in their ability ever to pretend and imagine lies the fertile basis for the emergence of insights which answer questions concerning the “what?” and “why?” of the world around them. Lonergan links this fertility of imagination to the flexibility of language, the avenue through which young children enter into the world mediated by meaning and motivated by values (Lonergan, 2001, p. 294). Given the confluence of the diverse strands in human consciousness, of the animal and rational, it is not surprising that “judgments of fact” in our consciousness may not be clearly distinguishable as now an instance of “animal extroversion,” now an instance of rationally warranted assent. The matter is further complicated by the fact that many of our spontaneous judgments as we grow as human beings are the result of acquired intellectual and moral habits. They resemble in their spontaneity the “judgments” of higher animals about a situation but in reality are of a different kind: so both Bella and I dodge out of the way of a car that rounds the corner as we take

54

Insight and Analysis

our walk. But my spontaneous judgments that it is a British Sea King helicopter that is flying overhead, or that it is a Georgian farmhouse that we can see on the far hillside are the result of numerous prior insights and rational judgments about data. Properly human judgments are the result of the marshalling and weighing of evidence, the reflection on the fulfillment of conditions, or sufficiency of evidence. On MacIntyre’s account what distinguishes human beings from higher animals is their ability to assess post factum both cognitive and moral judgments in this way, as they mature. But in fact the process of rationally or responsibly assessing a previous judgment is not too dissimilar from the process that leads up to a human, rational judgment in the first place. MacIntyre tends to overlook the fact that for human knowing these conscious processes are two sides of the same coin. Children as young as 3 or 4 engage in such rational deliberation about matters of fact as they assess the evidence provided by sensation and the information of parents and siblings; they become accustomed to the jokes and fibs of siblings and how to assess these. While MacIntyre means to include both moral and factual judgments in his discussion of human and animal knowing, his emphasis is upon the former, and certainly in this case one needs to draw a distinction in the case of childhood development. As the old notion of the “age of reason” indicated, the ability to begin to assess moral decisions and choices, to stand back from them as it were, occurs in children after the age of 5 or 6. However, it is arguable that in the case of rational judgments about matters of fact the ability to learn from mistakes and revise judgments occurs earlier than this. Naturally, one is not denying here the very evident facts of the capacities of higher animals to “learn by their mistakes,” from being taken in by, say, the “deliberate deceptions” of other animals. But quite young human children are also beginning the self-correcting process of learning by raising and answering the question “is it really so?” about something they have been told or have surmised about the data in some instance. And the answering of such a conscious question is precisely in terms of seeking and grasping relevant evidence for a reasoned judgment. Moral reflection on choices comes later in development than does the evaluations of evidence, of conditions as fulfilled leading up to judgment, and this can occur in 3- to 4-year-olds who ask and answer “is it so?” questions. As we know from the dramatic story of Helen Keller’s breakthrough to language, it is language which allows the articulation of human questions. But as experience of small children testifies, the capacity to question is one exercised in language but is realized rather than taught. One does not teach a child to question.

MacIntyre, Critical Realism, and Animal Consciousness

55

Questions, and the questions of children under 5 years are not only of the type which head for answers to the question “is it so?,” but are questions for intelligence, for understanding. “What?” questions also spontaneously arise and, of course, are cognitionally prior to the “is it so?” question. Children of 3 years can ask “what is it?” questions and “why?” questions, the questions which are the beginning of wonder as Aristotle claimed. Now such wonder about why, say, the sky is blue or why this or that, is not simply geared to reacting to the environment in such a way as to enhance probabilities of survival, as in the case of animal knowing. In fact, human beings can, ultimately, through asking “why?” put into question the very worth of survival itself! Such “why?” questions can eventually lead to answers which are explanatory concepts which animals do not have, do not aim at by asking “why?,” and show no interest in acquiring. So I can learn when quite young what a “circle” is by having an insight that connects different images of circles, and I can understand that they are similar as my mother or teacher helps me to distinguish between circles and squares. Such concepts or nominal definitions do not appear drastically different from the kind of “concepts” higher animals are capable of grasping and abstracting from a given environment. Lonergan, as we have seen above, indicates that “from the outside,” so to speak, they look alike. However, we come to a quite different kind of concept, and different kind of abstraction, when we think of the explanatory concepts human beings arrive at as they follow through on their “why?” questions, on their wonder. So we can move from a descriptive concept of a circle, through questioning and investigation to Euclid’s definition or concept of a circle as “a series of coplanar points equidistant from the centre.” Such explanatory definitions abstract from any given visual presentation. They also involve a conscious grasp of modalities such as possibility and necessity: if the spokes of a wheel were unequal in length there would be no possibility of its being circular, if they are equal its circularity is necessary. Explanatory understanding “goes beyond” imagining, as Descartes pointed out, using the example of a thousand sided object, the mathematics of which is accessible to us, while the imaginary construction of which is beyond human powers. As Quine observed in later years, this inability of imagination to keep pace with the intelligible constructs of science has implications for the cogency of materialist philosophies.3 Such conscious explanatory concepts are not the kind of

3 Quine made the point in an interview with Bryan Magee. See Bryan Magee, Men of Ideas (London: BBC Publications, 1978), pp. 175–176.

56

Insight and Analysis

“concepts” that animals have. And while human language is needed for us to think out and express such concepts, still it is our native capacity for conscious wonder and intelligent and reasonable inquiry which leads to such definitions, and grasps that they are answers to the questions we ask. While we answer “what is it?” questions asked by younger children with answers in terms of ordinary language, or descriptive definitions for the most part, as children grow we may begin to add in an element of explanation in giving an account of “what is meant by x.” Further, it would seem from the evidence provided by one’s own conscious experience that the insights which are explanatory answers to “what?” questions concerning the data are in some way continuous with the insights which provide only nominal accounts of “what x is, or means.” That is, we do not experience in consciousness the kind of discontinuity evident between, say, the experience of indigestion and that of moral choosing, in the case of the difference between an answer to the question “what is a circle?” which is merely nominal, and one which involves insights into Euclid’s explanatory definition. No doubt the ostensive definition of “circle” we give to a small child as “one like this example, and that example. . .” is very close, when looked at “from the outside,” to the exercise of the recognitional capacities for “concept” abstraction of higher animals. Since we continue to possess such recognitional capacities ourselves, ostensive concept learning may be in certain instances some kind of blend of properly human insight and the capacity we share with animals; processes of training no doubt illustrate this, as we acquire new automatisms and motor skill routines. However, the evidence of the conscious continuity between nominal definitions and explanatory definitions as answers and further answers to the question “what is it?” supports the claim that our elementary insights or intuitions are in some cases of a different type from the elementary intuitions leading to the grasp of a concept which we share with higher animals. This is most clearly illustrated when such insights into the data are the conscious result of a “what is it?” question asked by human adults and children. The worry of some human beings in affluent Western societies over being physically out of condition witnesses to the evolutionary norm that when alternative capacities for survival and development have been acquired, other, older muscles may no longer be flexed. Thus, it is no doubt the case that the conscious recognitional capacities of higher animals, their “concept forming” and “judging” in an analogous sense, are in better condition through use than similar capacities possessed by human beings, who no longer experience the need to employ these same capacities due to their increasing deployment as they develop of human intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility.

MacIntyre, Critical Realism, and Animal Consciousness

57

3. Conclusion MacIntyre’s comment on Wittgenstein’s remark “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him”(Philosophical Investigations, II, xi, 223), is that, if not in the case of lions then at least in the case of dolphins, if they could speak, some of our most able researchers in the field of dolphin psychology would be able to understand them (MacIntyre, 1999, pp. 58–59). My response to Wittgenstein’s claim is slightly more radical: higher animals, like dogs, lions, and dolphins, do already speak and, to some extent we already understand them; and if they “spoke any more” they would have crossed the line between being an animal and being a creature like ourselves. As any dog owner knows, such animals do speak insofar as they communicate to one another and to us, to some extent, both through body language and sound, their conscious intentions. The dog owner can perhaps increase his or her knowledge of that communication through attending training classes which make available to the lay person some of the insights gained through the research of animal trainers and psychologists. By “speaking more,” I mean not simply increasing the range of the repertoire of signs and sounds of animal communication but a change in nature and not simply degree of their conscious intentional operations expressed in the language. For animals manifest conscious intentionality,4 but not the humanly intelligent, reasonable, and responsible intentionality which raises and attempts to answer in accord with its own exigencies “what is it?,” “is it true?” and “is it good?” questions. In the debate between MacIntyre and Kenny, referred to above, it was noted that Kenny admitted that a capacity for giving reasons was lacking in a creature which lacked human language, but given his position as a

4 The idea of “intentionality as the mark of the mental” gained ground in analytical philosophy through the influence of such philosophers as Roderick Chisholm, in one way, and Elisabeth Anscombe, in another. However, in a number of essays C.B. Martin has argued that intentionality is insufficient to mark off the mental from the nonmental. See, C.B. Martin and K. Pfeifer (1986), “Intentionality and the Non-Psychological,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 46: 531–554; also see, C.B. Martin, D.M. Armstrong, and U.T. Place, Dispositions: A Debate, Tim Crane (ed.) (London: Routledge, 1996). Although they do not make the historical connection, the point made by Martin and Pfeifer is the quite Aristotelian one that the “intending” of final causality is found in nature in abundance, among animals and other creatures. Their work supports the position taken in the present article that a global notion of “intentionality,” or even, in the case of animals “conscious intentionality,” is not sufficient to demark the type of intelligent, reasonable, and responsible intentionality characteristic of human consciousness.

58

Insight and Analysis

post-Wittgensteinian philosopher of a certain stripe (and I would add generation) he could not but remain coy when the question arises as to just what this capacity is. So MacIntyre’s point, that there is a need to identify a capacity exercised in human language, rendering it specifically human, is, I argued, well taken. His attempt to indicate what such a capacity, or capacities might be in terms of Aquinas’ theory of analogical understanding of the “judgments” of higher animal as in some way like our own was, again, welcome. However, I argued above that his distinction between judgments as veridical perceptions shared by humans and animals, on the one hand, and, on the other, the specific capacity exercised by mature human beings to rationally assess those “judgments,” was insufficient. Rather, one needs to advert to the fact that the specifically human judgments we begin to make when even quite young deploy the reasonable criteria of searching for sufficient evidence for judgment, which we also deploy when we later assess the truth of a prior animal, veridical “judgment” or of a prior rational judgment of fact or of value. The idea that human beings move out of or beyond the animal condition simply because of the acquisition of human language risks becoming unintelligible; indeed, this claim to the uniqueness acquired through human language appears question-begging. This is the criticism MacIntyre himself levels at the views of John McDowell and H.G. Gadamer (MacIntyre, 1999, p. 60). However, given the rather thin account of the specifically human noetic capacities MacIntyre himself offers, his position appears open to the same kind of criticism. It is Lonergan’s philosophy, I believe, which provides us with helpful indications as to the specificity of human consciousness, while insisting on areas of continuity with the consciousness of higher animals. It does so by adverting to the specifically human intentional operations of raising and answering explanatory questions, questions of truth and questions of moral worth, which are answered in concept elaboration, and in judgments of truth and of value.5

5 For anyone impressed by Lonergan’s deployment and development of the classic antiskeptical arguments, MacIntyre’s concession, toward the end of his book, to the type of hyperbolic skepticism espoused by Nietzsche is rather disappointing. MacIntyre suggests that we cannot answer Nietzsche’s radical calling into question of the norms of rational argument, and so we have to acknowledge that he places himself outside the moral discourse which we take to be intrinsic to virtuous living (MacIntyre, 1999, pp. 165–166). I do not think Nietzsche can get off the hook of intelligence and reasonableness so easily. Any attempt on his part to do so in a way that could persuade us to follow suit is an acknowledgment of the norms which are the exigencies of human intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility. The only

MacIntyre, Critical Realism, and Animal Consciousness

59

References Lonergan, Bernard, J.F. 1957: Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Lonergan, Bernard, J.F. 1990: 1958 Halifax Lectures, Collection: The Collected Works of Bernard J.F. Lonergan, Vol. 5, M. Morelli, E. Morelli, F.E. Crowe, R. Doran, and T. Daly (eds.), Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Lonergan, Bernard, J.F. 2001: 1957 Boston College Lectures, Phenomenology and Logic: CWL, Vol. 19, McShane, Philip, (ed.), Toronto: University of Toronto Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair, 1999: Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. London: Duckworth.

option is the silence of the animal. But that, or even a Wittgensteinian “grunt,” is no option since once one has raised the skeptical question one is already committed. There is no exit. On this, see Andrew Beards (January 2005), “Beyond Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,” The Downside Review, 430: 45–76.

This page intentionally left blank

Part 2 Philosophy of Language

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 4

ÜBERSICHT as Oversight: Problems in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy In two important articles Hugo Meynell has examined aspects of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy in the light of Lonergan’s generalized empirical method.1 Meynell concludes that one may see in Lonergan’s work a synthesis of the antithetical stages in Wittgenstein’s development represented by the Tractatus, on the one hand, and the Philosophical Investigations, on the other. This Lonerganian synthesis, Meynell suggests, does justice both to the Tractarian concern with the way language “hooks onto the world,” and to the later Wittgensteinian preoccupation with forms of human meaning unconcerned with a metaphysical account of reality. Further, the way Lonergan handles the topic of objective knowledge stands outside the self-destructive strategy of the Tractatus. Since the publication of Lonergan’s 1957 lectures on mathematical logic we are in a better position to appreciate his comprehensive appreciation of mid-twentieth century developments in analytical philosophy.2 There are other significant allusions to analytical philosophy in his work subsequent to the 1957 lectures, but Lonergan’s principal expression of his views is to be found in the section on Dialectic in Method in Theology.3 The kind of analysis envisaged by Lonergan, in Method in Theology, would be one which rejected the methodological enterprise as so much “language gone on holiday,” as a deformation of our everyday language which alone is meaningful. Lonergan’s suspicion is that analysts have dismissed mental acts as occult entities because of the repeated failure of many philosophers to successfully formulate and answer the questions involved. However, he identifies the fundamental oversight in such a position as the inability to distinguish between language expressing original insights and language which expresses insights which have become common property. So, at one time, expressions such as “neurotic” or “inferiority complex” were reserved for the few initiated into the mysteries of Freud and Jung. But later such terminology entered into

1 Hugo Meynell, “Lonergan, Wittgenstein, and Where Language Hooks onto the World,” in Matthew Lamb (ed.), Creativity and Method: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lonergan (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1981), pp. 369–381; Hugo Meynell (April 1982), “Doubts about Wittgenstein’s Influence,” Philosophy, 57: 251–260. 2 Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, CWL, Vol. 18, McShane, (ed.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). 3 Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1972), pp. 254–257, 262.

64

Insight and Analysis

the fabric of the everyday languages of Western culture. And, perhaps, one can witness such, previously recondite, expressions as “quantum leap” following suit. For Lonergan, then, the confusion of originary with ordinary expression allows one the option of proclaiming language that is not ordinary language meaningless. Given Lonergan’s remarks, in Method in Theology, and Meynell’s work of critical comparison, may we not further inquire as to whether Wittgenstein’s later work manifests a number of inconsistencies which render it, to a large extent, self-destructive? In terms familiar from Insight, what are the positions, which invite development, and the counterpositions, which invite reversal, in Wittgenstein’s later work? As regards what may be seen as positive in the later Wittgenstein, from the perspective of Lonergan’s method, we may note that any attempt to throw light on the diversity of human expressions of meaning through the use of pragmatics and linguistics can only be welcome. Lonergan notes the specific contribution linguistic analysis has made to the clarification of, what he terms, constitutive and effective meaning linguistically expressed.4 Further, in the allusions to linguistic analysis scattered through various essays, Lonergan endorses the insistence of the analyst that terms be understood from the context of their use. Thus, in “The Origins of Christian Realism” Lonergan asserts that Fr. Schoonenberg has failed to learn the analyst’s lesson insofar as he is insufficiently attentive to the historical context of Chalcedon’s use of the terms “person,” “nature,” and “hypostasis.”5 Broadly speaking, one can say that Lonergan is in agreement with the evaluation of Wittgenstein’s later work given by continental philosophers such as H.G. Gadamer, J. Habermas, and K.O. Apel. These writers welcome Wittgenstein’s repudiation of the positivist ideal of the “reform” of ordinary language in the name of some logical metalanguage, for which the methodological rigor of the physical sciences is paradigmatic. Gadamer, Habermas, and Apel feel very much at home with the later Wittgenstein’s insistence on the social dimensions of linguistic meaning. The phenomenology of various meaningful human activities presented in the Philosophical Investigations may be seen as complementing similar analyses provided by Gadamer and by Lonergan—the various “patterns of experience” of Insight and the analyses offered in chapter 3 of Method in Theology.

4 Lonergan refers to Donald Evans, The Logic of Self-involvement (London: SCM Press, 1963), in Method in Theology, p. 75. 5 Method in Theology, p. 252.

Übersicht as Oversight

65

However, if philosophers like Gadamer and Habermas praise the later Wittgenstein’s appreciation of the social dimensions of meaning they are nevertheless critical of Wittgenstein’s work as insufficiently sensitive to the historical nature of language. Peter Winch has argued that a basic unity can be discerned in Wittgenstein’s work in terms of his search for the “logical space” of the proposition. The self-imposed inability of the Tractatus to speak of statements which are logically first, led, in Winch’s opinion, to Wittgenstein’s later analysis of the way the proposition is grounded in the everyday workings of ordinary language.6 If this be an appropriate way of describing Wittgenstein’s development then one would say that, for Gadamer and Habermas, Wittgenstein failed to fully appreciate that the “logical space” of the proposition is not only social but historical. N. Gier has drawn attention to a number of texts which demonstrate Wittgenstein’s appreciation of the historical nature of language-games and forms of life,7 but it can hardly be concluded from Gier’s evidence that this appreciation was very developed.8 Such a criticism of Wittgenstein’s work is not simply a matter of saying that it would have been nice of him to mention history. Rather, Gadamer and Habermas believe that Wittgenstein fails to observe the essential historical fluidity and transformability of language.9 For Gadamer, the possession of a language implies an opening to the meanings expressed in all languages, actual or potential. Wittgenstein’s position, that no one language-game provides a vantage point from which to judge another would seem to imply, however,

6 Peter Winch, “Introduction: The Unity of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy,” in P. Winch (ed.), Studies in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 1–19. 7 Nicholas F. Gier, Wittgenstein and Phenomenology (New York: Albany Press, 1981), pp. 190–191. 8 In his Autobiography, Collingwood remarked on the lack of historical awareness evident among his English philosophical contemporaries. Wittgenstein was no exception to the rule. At 4.11 of the Tractatus Wittgenstein states that the totality of true propositions is identical with the corpus of the natural sciences. Anthony Kenny asks where this leaves the factual judgments of the historian. See Kenny, Wittgenstein (Penguin, 1973), p. 99. 9 For the evaluation of Wittgenstein from the Gadamerian stance, see H.G. Gadamer, “The Phenomenological Movement” in Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 173–177; also the Editor’s Introduction, ibid., xxxiii–xl; P. Christopher Smith (Spring, 1977), “Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and Ordinary Language Philosophy,” The Thomist, 296–321. For Habermas’ opinion of Wittgenstein, see Jürgen Habermas, “A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method,” in Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), pp. 251–290.

66

Insight and Analysis

that there is no possibility of a hermeneutic of “recovery and suspicion.” Indeed, if W. Sharrock and R. Anderson are correct in their analysis of his position,10 Wittgenstein implies that whether one language-game or culture is able to understand another will be a matter decided in the particular case—another human culture might just turn out to be unintelligible. Unlike Gadamer, who insists that a “fusion of horizons” is always to be anticipated, Wittgenstein allows of no transcendental norms whereby one language-game participant could anticipate the intelligibility of an alien language-game. Nor, on Wittgenstein’s account, could one evaluate the moral worth of an alien culture in terms of its promotion of freedom, solidarity, and friendly dialog, as Gadamer suggests one can and should.11 Whether Wittgenstein is entirely consistent or coherent in his discussion of matters hermeneutical is a question which I wish to raise in this chapter. However, before turning to that topic, I would like to indicate what I believe to be the central incoherence in the standpoint of the later Wittgenstein. Hugo Meynell has drawn attention to the similarity between a number of passages in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty and Lonergan’s position.12 In a number of passages in On Certainty we find Wittgenstein employing a retorsive argument against the universal doubt of the skeptic. Such skepticism involves itself in incoherence, Wittgenstein avers, for the skeptic cannot doubt the meaning of the words in which his doubt is expressed.13 G. Baker and P. Hacker comment that this, what they term “Kantian,” strategy was used in Wittgenstein’s arguments against skepticism from as early as 1915 and remained an abiding feature of his philosophical writing.14 What is striking about this retorsive move against skepticism is that it is classically philosophical: it is not very different from the arguments against skepticism of Aristotle and Descartes. As such it is inconsistent with Wittgenstein’s later position as a whole and with his other approach to skepticism which dismisses it as the asking of idle, inappropriate questions; as regards the interests of ordinary language, universal doubt is otiose. However,

10 W.W. Sharrock and R.J. Anderson (July 1985), “Criticizing Forms of Life,” Philosophy, 60: 394–400. 11 On these sociopolitical ideals in Gadamer see Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), pp. 157–165. 12 Meynell, “Lonergan, Wittgenstein, and Where Language Hooks onto the World,” in Creativity and Method, p. 375. 13 G.E.M. Anscombe and H. von Wright (ed.), On Certainty (New York: Harper Torch Books, 1972), pp. 114, 306, 369, 456. 14 G.P. Baker and P.M.S. Hacker, An Analytical Commentary on the “Philosophical Investigations”: Volume 1 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 464.

Übersicht as Oversight

67

nowhere did Wittgenstein renege on the effectiveness of such arguments, and it is worth bearing this in mind as we go on to consider whether certain retorsive arguments may be applied to Wittgenstein’s own philosophy of ordinary language. An argument which Gadamer could well have employed against Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is one which we find him using to defend Heidegger’s historical ontology from the criticisms of Karl Löwith. Gadamer writes, He reflects about unreflectiveness; he philosophizes against philosophy in the name of naturalness and appeals to common sense. But if common sense were really a philosophical argument, then that would be the end of all philosophy and, with it, the end of any appeal to common sense. It is impossible for Löwith to get out of this difficulty except by acknowledging that an appeal to nature and naturalness is neither nature nor natural.15

Baker and Hacker assert that both Wittgenstein’s earlier and later work was concerned to descry the bounds of sense.16 In the later work ordinary language is seen as the only meaningful discourse. But discourse on meaningful and nonmeaningful language is patently not the discourse of ordinary language. Therefore, if ordinary language alone is meaningful, such discourse is itself meaningless. Rather like the man who asserts in eloquent English that any statement not made in the Cantonese tongue is nonsensical, Wittgenstein’s strategy shows itself to be self-destructive. The similarity between the incoherence of this position and Kant’s attempt to know that he could not know has been noted in a review by Vincent M. Cooke of David Bloor’s Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge.17 One can develop this argument further in terms of Lonergan’s criticism of the way linguistic analysis tends to overlook language as expressing original insights. Wittgenstein makes use of such explanatory terms as “languagegame,” “forms of life,” and “surface and depth grammar.” Now, as Baker and Hacker point out18 these terms can only be understood in their “argumentative context,” for if one wants to know the meaning of a term one must have recourse to its use. However, the use implied here is clearly not the use of ordinary language. In ordinary language “forms of life” might be taken to

15 Truth and Method, J. Cummings and G. Barden (eds.), (London: Sheed & Ward, 1975), Appendix iv, p. 456. 16 Baker and Hacker, An Analytical Commentary on the “Philosophical Investigations”: Volume 1, p. 480. 17 International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. xxv, no. 3 Sept. 1985: 329–330. 18 Baker and Hacker, An Analytical Commentary on the “Philosophical Investigations”: Volume 1, p. 480.

68

Insight and Analysis

indicate the inhabitants of the zoo, and “language-game” some form of crossword puzzle. Wittgenstein’s terms express original insights which await general assimilation before they can be said to be part of ordinary language. But on his own account such terms must be disqualified as meaningless in view of their lack of general currency. Such a charge of self-destructiveness will, no doubt, appear rude and harsh to a Wittgensteinian. Various kinds of counterarguments may be proffered. Baker and Hacker sense the difficulty here and attempt to deal with it in the following manner: . . . Philosophy describes language “from within” . . . The reason for this harks back to the Tractatus distinction between showing and saying. The bounds of sense cannot be described, for there is nothing beyond the bounds of sense to be described.19

Is there anything in such a defense which allows escape from the incoherence which, I have alleged, is present in Wittgenstein’s position? I think not. To begin with, Wittgenstein’s later position does not seem to allow escape from incoherence on the basis of the Tractatus distinction between saying and showing. For the distinction between saying and showing as demonstrated in the Tractatus was “mystical” and philosophical. Nowhere in ordinary language do we find such a “technical” distinction. And if such a distinction is not to be found in ordinary language then, surely, it must be meaningless. Never in everyday discourse do we meet such expressions as, “Language is unique, so cannot be explained. It must show itself.”20 Further, if the image of philosophy describing language “from within” is anything more than a pretty metaphor, if it is asserted as, in some sense, a description of what is the case as regards language and the bounds of meaningful discourse, then such a description cannot escape the charge that it implies a transcendental viewpoint, that is, a viewpoint which itself goes beyond the viewpoints of ordinary language in its everyday working. The Wittgensteinian might, further, respond that the argument so far has been mistaken in ascribing to Wittgenstein a meta-view which is still philosophical. It will be argued that his own proposal for a therapeutic healing of the self-inflicted wounds of philosophy was not yet more philosophy. Rather, Wittgenstein described what he was doing as a kind of

19 Ibid. 20 Wittgenstein Manuscript 110, 59, quoted in Garth Hallett, A Companion to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 214.

Übersicht as Oversight

69

“natural history of human beings.”21 In this sense, therefore, one must take seriously Wittgenstein’s repeated protestations to do away with all explanation so that a simple description of ordinary language remains.22 The argument that Wittgenstein was not concerned with anything which could be called “philosophy,” in the traditional sense, is, however, sophistical. Take, for example, the above-mentioned distinction between “explanation” and “description.” What is to be made of Wittgenstein’s use of these terms and the distinction he draws between them? If we wish to clarify this issue it is obviously no good turning to ordinary language for help. For ordinary language does not involve itself in a general description, an Übersicht, of itself. Rather, attempting to state what Wittgenstein means by “explanation” and “description” immediately involves one in the philosophical question, “What am I doing when I am knowing?” The attempt to describe Wittgenstein’s enterprise as a nonphilosophical “natural history” or, perhaps, “sociology” also becomes involved in a circularity which is vicious. For the claims to knowledge made by these disciplines are bound up with the philosophical questions, “What am I doing when I am knowing?” and “What do I know when I do that?” If one doubts that such questions arise with regard to cognitive disciplines then one only has to turn to Wittgenstein’s later work to see the way in which they do. For Wittgenstein’s remarks on Freud, Darwin, and Copernicus23 demonstrate the way in which his own position has implications for the methodology of the sciences. With regard to the designation of Wittgenstein’s program as purely descriptive of ordinary language, further problems arise. Wittgenstein tells us that his description of ordinary language is done in the light of, receives its direction from, the philosophical problems.24 But it is no less evident that his phenomenological analysis also, and primarily, receives direction from the central thesis of his work: that there is a constant temptation for us to yield to the bewitchment of our intelligence by language, such bewitchment having produced the philosophical systems. As P. Christopher Smith has remarked,25 such a concern with the way language can lead us astray has been a theme treated by philosophy since the time of Plato. Lonergan’s work has provided a self-authenticating way by which we can arrive at correct or probable

21 Philosophical Investigations, section 415. 22 Ibid., section 126. 23 On Freud, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, Cyril Barrett, (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966); on Darwin and Copernicus, Culture and Value, G.K. von Wright, (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), p. 18e. 24 Philosophical Investigations, section 109. 25 P. Christopher Smith, p. 300.

70

Insight and Analysis

judgments without the fear that we have been misled from some “suspect source,” be it language or any other. As it stands, then, a warning on the possibility of linguistic obfuscation is nothing controversial. But what is problematic is Wittgenstein’s insistence that de jure all philosophy is the result of the bewitchment of mind by language, not simply that de facto all philosophies in the past have been the result of linguistic illusion. The only cure for such mythomania, for Wittgenstein, is a return of language to its only meaningful locus: the practical use made of it by commonsense. In view of all this it is difficult to rest content with Wittgenstein’s assertion that “in the end” all philosophy does is describe the workings of ordinary language.26 We appear, then, to be left with two alternatives. Either we take it that Wittgenstein proposes the self-destructive thesis that only ordinary language is meaningful, or, we must conclude, he dogmatically asserts that only ordinary language plus his meta-view of it are meaningful. Now although this may strike one as a position as eccentric as that of the Bellman in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, who asserted that whatever he stated three times was true, it is intelligible in terms of Wittgenstein’s personal development, for it has often been remarked that Wittgenstein assumed all philosophy had failed with the failure of his own early work. However, such dogmatism is, in the end, itself incoherent. For Wittgenstein, like any other reasonable author, would only have us agree with him on the strength of the evidence for his position, evidence which, he informs us, we simply have to “look and see.” Like any other philosopher, he dismisses positions for which the evidence is inadequate. The dogmatic assertion of a position by such a writer can only invite the reasonable response, gratis asseritur gratis negatur. If there is, then, a self-destructive circularity at the heart of Wittgenstein’s attempt to condemn philosophy in the name of ordinary language, there are no less evident examples in his later work of the incoherence which results from trespassing across boundaries which one has drawn for oneself. Wittgenstein’s venturing into the field of hermeneutics is a case in point. In the Remarks on Frazer’s “Golden Bough” Wittgenstein’s stance appears somewhat ambivalent. In the earlier sections of the work he espouses a hermeneutic position which exemplifies what for Gadamer is the original sin in Interpretation, and for Lonergan is the “Myth of the Empty Head.” In opposition to Frazer’s explanation of primitive myth and ritual as proto-science, Wittgenstein asserts that the interpreter must rid himself of such prejudices if he is to see his material aright. He must come to his subject matter “theory free” so as to let the facts “speak for themselves.”

26 Philosophical Investigations, section 124.

Übersicht as Oversight

71

N. Gier observes27 that such a hermeneutic is not very different from that of W. Dilthey. In other words, Wittgenstein’s position would, like Dilthey’s, demand a passive cataloguing of alien cultural worlds without the possibility of a real acknowledgment of the way in which the stance of the observer is itself historically conditioned. What Matthew Lamb has written on the anomalies operative in Dilthey’s hermeneutics28 would equally well apply to this position of Wittgenstein. However, D.Z. Phillips has pointed out that a rather different interpretative principle emerges from the latter part of Remarks on Frazer’s “Golden Bough.”29 Wittgenstein suggests that we should understand a primitive culture in terms of a “deep” coherence manifest in the life and ritual of its people.30 In Wittgenstein’s later work it is this “principle” which functions as the acknowledged and unacknowledged hermeneutical principle of “recovery and suspicion.” Despite the fact, noted earlier, that Wittgenstein insisted that one language-game could not pass judgment on another, it is evident that what Wittgenstein found worthy of respect was the coherence of the primitive religious world where meaning was compact and undifferentiated. It is this simplicity which is seen as the element to be “recovered.” In the early 1930s Wittgenstein wrote, I think now that the right thing would be to begin my book with remarks about metaphysics as a kind of magic. But in doing this I must neither speak in defence of magic nor ridicule it. What it is that is deep about magic would be kept.31

27 N. Gier, p. 223. 28 Matthew Lamb, History, Method and Theology (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1978). 29 D.Z. Phillips, Religion without Explanation, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 120. 30 Remarks on Frazer’s “Golden Bough,” R. Rhees, (ed.) (Doncaster: Brynmill, 1979), pp. 16e–18e. John B. Thompson has noted that Wittgenstein’s suggestion that we interpret other cultures in terms of the basic constants of birth, death, and reproduction proves, in practice, to be hermeneutically sterile. See his Critical Hermeneutics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 116–120, 154–155. Why such a notion remains sterile is not too difficult to explain. For plants, animals, and men die, and animals and men manifest some “conscious reaction” to death, but Wittgenstein does not, and cannot, specify the way human cultures differ from animal groups in their reaction to death. John W. Cook and Stanley Cavell, among others, have strenuously defended Wittgenstein against the charge of Behaviorism, often levelled against him, but in this instance, as in others, his position does not appear notably different from a behaviorist stance. 31 Remarks on Frazer’s “Golden Bough,” p. vi.

72

Insight and Analysis

However, Wittgenstein is suspicious of the intrusion of “theory” or philosophy into that primitive world. On the first page of Remarks on Frazer’s “Golden Bough” we read: Was Augustine mistaken, then, when he called on God on every page of the Confessions? Well—one might say—if he was not mistaken, then the Buddhist holyman, or some other, whose religion expresses quite different notions, surely was. But none of them was making a mistake except where he was putting forward a theory.32

In Wittgenstein’s opinion Frazer’s early twentieth-century imperious rationalism reveals him as inferior to the primitive societies which he would “criticize.” Philosophers such as Rush Rhees and Peter Winch have been influenced by this respect for the primitive and distain for the modern, evident in Wittgenstein’s later writing. In his, much discussed, Understanding a Primitive Society Winch states that our problem in understanding an alien culture may be related to the relative incoherence and meaninglessness of our own.33 In fact, Wittgenstein’s hermeneutical position can be seen as an expression of that tragic Romanticism which has become a conspicuous element in our Western intellectual Weltanschauung during the last 2 centuries. The desire of such tragic Romanticism to return to a simpler world, uninhibited by modern “theory” and untroubled by further questions is to be found expressed throughout Wittgenstein’s later work.34 The recognition of this “tragic sense” in Wittgenstein’s writing invites a comparison of his work with a work of philosophy preeminently concerned with the tragedy of the modern “loss of innocence”: Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes. In the Phänomenologie Hegel examines the tragic nature of the

32 Ibid. , p. 1e. 33 Peter Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society,” in Bryan R. Wilson (ed.), Rationality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), pp. 78–111, 108ff. 34 It is well known, from the biographical literature, that Wittgenstein was a man deeply concerned with religion. Indeed, just as the author of The Imitation of Christ wished to protect genuine religion from the sophistries of decadent Scholastic theology, so Wittgenstein wished to preserve the important, “deep” area of religious sentiment and morality from the incursions of jejune intellectual theory. Wittgenstein’s work, then, like that of Unamuno, manifested that tragic alienation of “Reason” from religion, so characteristic of modern Western culture. One might venture to suggest that Wittgenstein’s “tragedy” was that of one who struggled for authenticity within what was, to a large extent, an unauthentic intellectual tradition.

Übersicht as Oversight

73

necessary destruction of more primitive cultural life-worlds in the process of the emergence of cultural worlds characterized by a greater differentiation of human consciousness. Hegel, in a way analogous to Wittgenstein, admired the simple, undifferentiated world of the ancient Greek polis, but where his insight is superior to that of Wittgenstein is, I believe, in his recognition of the impossibility of a return from a more differentiated to a less differentiated stage of cultural development. The dream of some Rousseau-like return to primitive “innocence” is what Lonergan has variously identified as the myth of the automatic solution or the desire for infantile regression.35 One cannot effect cultural amnesia, any more than one can dis-invent the atomic bomb. In attempting to analyze why it is impossible to realize such cultural amnesia one begins to see, I believe, yet another far-reaching incoherence in the later Wittgenstein’s attempt to reduce meaningful discourse to the discourse of everyday language. Wittgenstein’s proposal for a therapeutic dissolution of philosophy in the name of ordinary language, which would “leave everything as it is,” would not, in fact, leave our ordinary languages as they are. What Wittgenstein is really proposing is the creation of a philosopher’s Utopia, a “thought-experiment” world where people only ever ask for red apples or bricks: a linguistic world every bit as artificial as that sketched out in the Tractatus. The self-destructiveness of Wittgenstein’s program has nowhere better been revealed than in the various attempts to develop theologies based on his later work. In answer to the criticism that Wittgensteinian fideism appears to leave religions free to develop in any bizarre fashion they choose, theologians such as D.Z. Phillips and G. Hallett have replied that religions have their own communal criteria for decision making.36 Religions have their own prophets, reformers, and traditions which facilitate progress. However, such a line of argument tends to overlook the difficulty which the history of Christianity and, it can be argued, of other world religions presents for the Wittgensteinian. For during most of its near 2,000 year history Christianity has been involved in a commitment to the theoretical differentiation of

35 Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1957), p. 525; A Second Collection (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974), p. 29. 36 D.Z. Phillips, Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970); Garth Hallett, Darkness and Light: The Analysis of Doctrinal Statements (New York: Paulist, 1975). Hallett writes: “What criterion [for evaluating actions] should a Christian adopt if he wishes to be both true to his Christian past and consistent in his or her moral reasoning?” See his Christian Moral Reasoning (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1983), p. 72.

74

Insight and Analysis

consciousness. Here one is not simply talking about the Leonine revival of Thomism or even of the influence of mediaeval scholasticism, but of the profound effect which the Greek discovery of mind had on the development of the Christian religion. Indeed, in this respect Wittgenstein was more consistent than those theologians who have utilized his work. For, since he regarded the use of philosophy in religion as superstitious37 and believed that Vatican I demonstrated Catholicism’s commitment to philosophy,38 he stated that it was impossible for him to embrace Catholicism. Theologians like Phillips and Hallett are, then, faced with a dilemma. Their professed desire is to leave as it is the religious language of the ordinary believer, yet if their proposed systematic dissolution of philosophy were taken to its logical conclusion there would result a radical reform of ordinary religious language. Yet if such a central element in our cultural tradition as Christianity is seen to have been so radically affected, or “infected,” by the theoretical differentiation of consciousness, then this can only serve to indicate how deeply our culture and its ordinary languages are involved in traditions bound up with the development of philosophy. The tradition of philosophy which built upon Hegel’s historical “turn” has never ceased to draw attention to the way philosophy developed as an integral element in the cultural evolution of the West. And I believe that manifestations of the theoretical differentiation of consciousness have not been lacking in Eastern cultures. The theoretical and scientific differentiations of consciousness have become a major element in the world mediated by meaning and motivated by value in our culture. In Method in Theology Lonergan notes the way that there has been a kind of feedback from philosophy into the ordinary language which was the condition of possibility for philosophy’s emergence. He writes, For if creative thought in philosophy and science is too austere for general consumption, creative thinkers are usually rare. They have their brief day, only to be followed by the commentators, the teachers, the popularizers that illuminate, complete, transpose, simplify. So the worlds of theory and common sense partly interpenetrate and partly merge . . .39 . . . In a people united by common language, common loyalties, common moral and religious traditions as well as by economic interdependence, the culture of

37 Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, p. 59. 38 Recollections of Wittgenstein, R. Rhees, (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 107–108. 39 Method in Theology, p. 98.

Übersicht as Oversight

75

the educated may affect many of the uneducated, much as theory affected pre-theoretical common sense. So by successive adaptations the innovations of theory can penetrate in ever weaker forms through all layers of a society . . .40

Lonergan refers to Bruno Snell’s analysis of the way in which the Greek philosophical achievement affected Greek literature to produce a classical humanism which prevailed in European culture until the late middle ages.41 In modern European culture a scientific humanism has largely replaced the classical one. On the influence of the scientific achievement on our culture, Lonergan writes, . . . Modern science has its progeny. As a form of knowledge, it pertains to man’s development and grounds a new and fuller humanism. As a rigorous form of knowledge, it calls forth teachers and popularizers and even the fantasy of science fiction . . . It is the power of the mass media to write for, speak to, to be seen by all men. It is the power of an educational system to fashion the nation’s youth . . .42

The fruits of this interpenetration of theory and commonsense can be far from beneficial. In a way that recalls Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of “Egemonia,” or the analyses of the Critical Theorists, Lonergan points out, The results are ambivalent. It will happen that the exaggerations of philosophic error are abandoned, while the profundities of philosophic truth find a vehicle that compensates for the loss of the discredited myths. But it will also happen that theory fuses more with common nonsense than with common sense, to make the nonsense pretentious and, because it is common, dangerous and even disastrous.43

The presence of theory within commonsense and ordinary language is usually manifested as a varying admixture of “reasoning” and, what Gadamer would term, prejudgments, of beliefs and immanently generated knowledge. So I may give a number of reasons why I shall vote for a socialist government at an election, but there will normally be a point where, sooner rather than later, my reasons give out and I assert, perhaps, that socialism is what any “sane person” should support. Although, as Lonergan avers, commonsense shows a bias to omnicompetence, it is equally the case that it defers to the “expert” or

40 41 42 43

Ibid., pp. 98–99. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 99. Ibid., p. 98.

76

Insight and Analysis

“authority” in the process of its reasoning. The “syllogistic form” often recognizable in ordinary language will run: “x ‘stands to reason’ because y says so,” where “y” is the politician, the media demagogue, the scientific “expert” or, even, the religious authority. But what would be the implications for ordinary language of a culture-wide diffusion of the Wittgensteinian viewpoint, with its “therapeutic” dissolution of theory? For Wittgenstein, Karl Barth’s writing on the Trinity,44 Freud’s interpretation of dreams,45 and the scientific theories of Darwin and Copernicus46 are mythologies which, like the alienating ideologies of the Marxists, have obscured the authentic substructure of everyday action and praxis. Wittgenstein wrote that he wished to change a “style” of thinking47 so that one would no longer oppose a “correct theory” to an “erroneous one” but would see that both were superfluous. Would not a generalized diffusion of such an attitude require a shift of perception on the part of ordinary language which would be little short of axial? What would become of the prevailing scientific humanism, so impressed, as it is, by the march of true theory, overturning ignorance? Further, if the various theoretical traditions to which commonsense and ordinary language have looked as “authoritative” were dissolved, how would this leave ordinary language unchanged? Ordinary language would be told to look to itself as its own authority. Far from “leaving everything as it is” in ordinary language the systematic carrying through of what Wittgenstein proposes would involve a gradual moulding of language not very different from that imagined by George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.48 The basic objection to Wittgenstein’s program which I have in mind is not, then, that it ignores the part played by, what Habermas would term, prelinguistic forces such as labor or, more fundamentally, individual and group bias in ordinary language, valid as these objections are. Rather, I believe that one of Wittgenstein’s fundamental errors was to have overlooked the fact that the commonsense differentiation of consciousness was not the only differentiation of consciousness to have contributed to the emergence of the complex historical phenomena which we know as the ordinary languages of Eastern and Western culture. Such an oversight results in Wittgenstein’s stance being involved in incoherence. For what Wittgenstein forbade was that

44 45 46 47 48

Culture and Value, p. 85e. Cf. Lectures and Conversations. Culture and Value, p. 18e. Lectures and Conversations, pp. 28, 32. On the creation of “Newspeak”: George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin, 1949), pp. 44ff.

Übersicht as Oversight

77

violence be done to ordinary language, and yet his own attempt to banish philosophers from his Republic can only result in such violence being done. Some years ago, Fergus Kerr attempted a critique of Lonergan’s work, based on various “end of philosophy” philosophies.49 Kerr argued that Lonergan’s method was but one more example of bewitched language and of an imperialistic hellenism that had had its day. In the course of his argument, Kerr wrote, “The alternative to analysing and dissolving one philosophical theory is not necessarily to propose another.”50 For those, like Kerr, who are concerned to harmonize the Wittgensteinian with the Heideggerian “end of philosophy” a book which compares the later Wittgenstein with the deconstructive writing of J. Derrida51 should prove a useful contribution. However, I tend to find the comparison illuminating in a way which Kerr would probably not. For it does not appear difficult to detect that Derrida’s attempts to provide strategies for reading texts which facilitate a move beyond philosophy have no meaning other than for those who have filled their heads with the old philosophical questions. To employ the Hegelian expression, all negation is determinate. And if Kerr and others fail to notice that negation only reveals the one who negates as intellectually and morally committed, then they need look no further than Wittgenstein’s work to learn the lesson. For Wittgenstein maintained, in both phases of his philosophical development, that the skeptic cannot speak without disclosing something of the “self” of his self-involvement.52

49 Fergus Kerr (1976), “Beyond Lonergan’s Method: A Response to William Matthews,” New Blackfriars, 57: 59–71. 50 Ibid. p. 69. 51 Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). 52 To contrast Lonergan’s thought with Derrida’s deconstruction is not to simply slot Lonergan into the philosophical tradition with which Derrida is ill at ease. That would be to overlook the far-reaching implications of the fact that, for Lonergan, the term “philosophy” denotes two distinct, but related, differentiations of consciousness: the world of theory and the world of interiority. Moreover, if some of Derrida’s pronouncements on “The Tradition” appear shocking, there are no doubt those who have found difficulty in accepting such broad Lonerganian brush strokes as, “Five hundred years separate Hegel from Scotus . . ., that notable interval of time was largely devoted to working out in a variety of manners the possibilities of the assumption that knowing consists in taking a look” (Insight, p. 372). Indeed, if “deconstruction” is understood as exploiting Heidegger’s characterization of western metaphysics as a metaphysics of “presencing,” and if such a metaphysics is understood as the corollary of epistemologies of “looking” (as F. Lawrence has indicated in “Self-Knowledge in History,” in Language, Truth and Meaning, note 66, p. 334), then the identification of certain basic anomalies within “The Tradition,” which Derrida’s work achieves will cause little surprise from the viewpoint of generalized empirical method.

Chapter 5

Anti-Realism and Critical Realism: Dummett and Lonergan The present chapter is intended as a critical comparison of some of the basic positions in the philosophies of Michael Dummett and Bernard Lonergan. The work of neither philosopher is celebrated for easy accessibility, and so such an attempt at critical comparison runs the risk of giving too impressionistic an account of the positions of either philosopher. The deficiencies of what follows below will, I hope, be remedied by those who may take up the invitation that this chapter offers of examining the areas of convergence and divergence in the work of these important thinkers. The conclusion for which I will argue can be characterized as the claim that many of the strong points in Dummett’s position are evident in his move away from the neo-behaviorism of the later Wittgenstein, whereas his weaknesses result from a continued attachment to the prejudices of the Philosophical Investigations. Such an assessment occurs on the basis of the strategies which emerge from Lonergan’s philosophy. It will be necessary, then, in the course of my argument to present a basic outline of Lonergan’s exposition and defense of his fundamental philosophical positions. My first task, however, will be to present some of the key elements in Dummett’s arguments for his version of anti-realism.

1. Dummett’s Anti-Realism The anti-realist position which Dummett espouses is a result of his wideranging philosophical investigation into a viable meaning theory. In the work The Logical Basis of Metaphysics Dummett has provided the fullest exposition so far of his program for a meaning theory which has some hope of accurately reflecting the rational practice of language users.1

1 Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). I have continued the dialog between Lonergan and Dummett in my contribution to the Library of Living Philosophers volume on Dummett, in which Dummett responds to me, and in my book on Lonergan and analytical metaphysics. See, Andrew Beards, “Dummett: Philosophy and Religion” (863–888), and Michael Dummett, “A Reply to Andrew Beards,” (889–899), in, The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, Library of Living Philosophers Vol. 31, R. Auxier and

Anti-Realism and Critical Realism

79

Dummett believes that, rather than an all too tempting assimilation of meaning theory to the semantics of classical logic, what is required is the prior adumbration of a meaning theory in order to clarify the nature of the semantics by which we assign meanings to the terms and relations of various logical formalizations. If the task of elucidating the meaning of such matters as the truth-assertions of speakers can be achieved, then, Dummett believes, we may be in a position to move forward to an assessment of metaphysical problems which arise concerning issues such as reductionism and truth claims concerning the past.2 To understand how Dummett’s anti-realism emerges from his investigation of semantics and meaning theory one has to understand the challenge to classical logic (the logic exemplified in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus) posed by the various forms of intuitionistic logic. Dummett characterizes the connection between realism with regard to some class of statements (logical, factual, and mathematical) and classical logic in the following way: The very minimum that realism can be held to involve is that statements in the given class relate to some reality that exists independently of our knowledge of it, in such a way that reality renders each statement in the class determinately true or false, again independently of whether we know, or are even able to discover, its truth-value. Thus realism involves acceptance, for statements of the given class, of the principle of bivalence, the principle that every statement is determinately either true or false.3

Dummett acknowledges, however, that a realist can recognize the claims of intuitionistic logic as such systems attempt to express, what Lonergan terms, the genesis of knowledge. That is, as medieval philosophers observed, in regard to the principle of excluded middle, one may wish to answer a question with neither “yes” nor “no,” but rather draw further distinctions. In the courtroom the accused may wish to neither assert nor deny the proposition that he does not now beat his wife. As Dummett points out, a realist about mathematics, such as a Platonist, may allow the introduction of logical operators from intuitionistic logic into his formalizations, such that he is not concerned with the application of the principle of bivalence at

E. Hahn, (ed.) (La Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 2007); Andrew Beards, Method in Metaphysics: Lonergan and the Future of Analytical Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 2 Dummett states, however, that he is now unsure of the capacity of the proposed program to reach its objectives (see, Preface and Introduction of The Logical Basis of Metaphysics). 3 Dummett (1982), “Realism,” Synthese, 52: 55–112, 55.

80

Insight and Analysis

every point in his investigation. What distinguishes the anti-realist position, however, . . . is not the admissibility of non-classical logical operators, but the inadmissibility of classical ones . . .4

Thus, for the anti-realist what are of significance are the constructivist semantics of mathematical logics like that of Heyting. On Heyting’s view the truth or falsity of a well-formed mathematical statement is relative to the constructive technique we have for evaluating it. Such insights from intuitionistic mathematical logic are, then, of prime importance for Dummett. They suggest to us that truth and falsity are not properties ascribed to sentences by the way the world is and is not. Rather, they are properties we assign to sentences relative to our modes of proof. What is crucial, however, in the construction of a theory of meaning, is the investigation of the rational practices of language users. For intuitionistic logics have shown us that we should not be so easily led to assume that the semantics implicit in classical logic is the basic paradigm for a meaning theory. One needs, rather, to attend to the sources of meaning implicit in human linguistic activity as the more fundamental constituent in meaning theory; and the account we arrive at through such attention to meaningful use will provide an understanding of the semantic interpretation we are to give of the logical formalizations. The adumbration of a meaning theory will, however, have as an initial framework at least some of the features identified in the semantics of classical logic. It is in this regard that Frege’s philosophy is still of fundamental importance for Dummett. Frege’s distinctions between sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung), provide fundamental tools for probing the meaningful use rational agents make of language. It is in an investigation of the meaningful practice of speakers that we may be able to identify the way truth and falsity receive their meaning. Dummett’s attempt to undermine the inflated role which the semantics of classical logic has played in recent analytical philosophy appears to have borne fruit. Thus, in his late work, Donald Davidson acknowledged that Dummett had been primarily responsible for his own shift away from an over-attachment to the Tarskian formulation of truth.5 Tarski’s attempt

4 Ibid., p. 56. 5 Donald Davidson (1990), “The Dewey Lectures 1989: The Structure and Content of Truth,” Journal of Philosophy, 87: 279–328, 287.

Anti-Realism and Critical Realism

81

to provide a “concept of truth” was in terms of the identification of T-convention sentences which would capture something of our intuitions regarding truth. Thus the T-sentences, or biconditionals, would be of the form “S iff P,” where “S” could be replaced by any well-formed sentence of a language familiar to us, plus the truth operator, and “P” would be the iteration of the sentence, stating the condition on which the statement would be true. For example, “Snow is white is true if and only if snow is white.” However, Dummett’s insistence on the priority of meaning theory over the semantics of classical logic is well illustrated by his drawing attention to the way the enumeration of such T-sentences depends upon our powers of translation. Far from “capturing” the concept of truth such biconditionals depend for their construction upon our prior grasp of why and how it is meaningful to insert the words “is true” where we do. The investigation of the abilities associated with the meaningful use of such terms as “true” and “false” will, perhaps, provide some understanding of how it is we can translate the Tarskian formulations into statements in our language in which we assert the truth-conditions for truth claims, or judgments. In chapter 4 of The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, Dummett fleshes out his account of a theory of meaning based upon an investigation of the practices of speakers of a natural language. It is in this part of his argument that one may observe a decided shift away from the approach to meaning as use as this is understood in the work of the later Wittgenstein. Dummett emphasizes that to provide an account of meaning as use which does justice to truly human linguistic use, recognition of conscious intentional activity and understanding is crucial, . . . because speech and writing are conscious activities on the part of rational agents, just as playing a game is such an activity.6

Human linguistic meaning is a product of intentional and conscious propositional attitudes, such as questioning, commanding, and judging. Further, it is important to take note of such phenomena as ideolects in understanding the sources of linguistic meaning. As Saul Kripke has argued, there may be failures in communication precisely because the meaning a speaker intends in the use of his words is not the same meaning understood by the community with which he attempts to communicate.

6 Logical Basis, p. 88.

82

Insight and Analysis

To say, with the later Wittgenstein, that the meaning of a word is simply a practical ability . . . is to render mysterious our capacity to know whether we understand.7

And Dummett observes how Wittgenstein appears to be nagged by counterexamples to his view that meaning could be treated apart from conscious intentional activity. Because we have the capacity to know that we understand it is clearly absurd to answer the question “Can you speak Spanish?” with the reply, “I don’t know, try me out and we’ll see”; whereas one could intelligibly give such a reply if the question regarded one’s capacity to wiggle one’s ears.8 Dummett claims that we can imagine beings such as Martians who might interpret human utterances in a way that prescinds from the fact that they are expressions of intentional meaning. Such beings could, no doubt, become quite proficient at predicting human activity, but they would fail to understand what human linguistic practice essentially is. In accord with this approach to linguistic meaning, as the expression of conscious, intentional activity, Dummett draws attention to the way a theory of meaning must attempt to render explicit what is implicit in meaningful, linguistic practice. Again, he finds Frege’s work to be illuminating here. So, for instance, Frege pointed out the way awareness of truth-conditions is implicit not only in making truth claims, but in the questioning that anticipates the answers which such truth claims, or judgments provide. One may argue that there is a meaningful contrast between, what Dummett terms, “implicit” and “explicit” knowledge concerning language use. Thus, explicit knowledge would be one’s explicit understanding of what, say, a particular Italian word means. Cases of implicit knowledge, however, are those in which a language user operates in accord with a rule, without explicitly expressing that rule; so one can get someone to recognize that they have always implicitly operated with a rule for using the nominative and accusative cases with regard to personal pronouns. Dummett suggests the contrast here is between knowing that the proposition which expresses such rules is true, on the one hand, and, on the other, in the case of implicit knowledge, simply knowing the proposition.9 Dummett distinguishes between his own attempt at explication and the competence theories associated with Noam Chomsky. Chomsky’s theories

7 Ibid., p. 93. 8 Ibid., p. 94. 9 Ibid., p. 96.

Anti-Realism and Critical Realism

83

regard supposed mental operations that are unconscious, and as such they have to be assessed in terms of the methods appropriate to the science of psychology. The kind of meaning theory Dummett is attempting to formulate, however, has recourse to what must, in some way, consciously guide the rational, linguistic practices of the speaker.10 In attempting to understand the practice of a speaker claiming that some statement is true, Frege’s semantic distinction between sense and reference is, according to Dummett, fundamental. If we understand the relation between truth and meaning by attending to the practice of speakers of a language we will see that the speakers’ understanding of a linguistic package is not primarily in terms of the truth or falsity of the statement. Rather, as Frege indicates, the grasping of sense allows us to understand what conditions would have to be fulfilled in order for the statement to be true. But the import of the insights which emerge from intuitionistic logics is that one cannot assume that it will be the truth-conditions as already instantiated or not instantiated in the world that will be fundamental for speakers’ rational attempts to justify some class of statements. There are cases in which we make truth claims where the truth-conditions for those claims are what Dummett terms “trivial,” there are others where the truth-conditions are nontrivial. Dummett argues that our claims about the past, or about other minds are not cases in which we can intelligibly take it that it will be nontrivial truth-conditions out there in the world that will determine for us whether those claims are justified or not. In the case of the past we cannot simply take it beforehand that the conditions are already realized or not realized such as to make a statement true or false. Intuitionistic mathematics suggests, rather, that what is fundamental is the procedure of justification, rather than appealing to truth-conditions assumed to be already fulfilled or not in the real world. In the case of the knowledge of other minds Dummett is very much attached to the Wittgensteinian view that to make claims about someone being in pain or not is not to anticipate that there are certain nontrivial truth-conditions which are or are not fulfilled in the experience of the other person. What the position on other minds amounts to is the view that in the case of claiming that “John is in pain,” one means that, trivially, the truthcondition “John is in pain” is fulfilled. But by claiming that this condition is trivial one is denying that the truth-conditions of the statement “John is in pain” are arrived at through a process of understanding what “feeling” and “pain” are on the basis of introspection regarding one’s own conscious

10 Ibid., p. 97.

84

Insight and Analysis

experience. What both Wittgenstein and Dummett want to avoid here is a behaviorism that holds that ascription of pain to another is simply a matter of judgments about external behavior. Between the behaviorist option and the opposite extreme, which sees personal introspection as the source of the formulation of the truth-conditions, they hold for the view that pain behavior does not constitute evidence for the truth of the judgment “John is in pain”; rather, the observed behavior is, in some way, the manifestation of the truth of the statement. Dummett’s anti-realism, then, emerges from his arguments to the effect that realism regarding the way the world either makes true or false a statement prior to, and independently of our attempts to justify the statement, cannot be proven. He does grant that there are basic acts of recognition where we simply see that the truth-condition for a statement is given. Such cases are those trivial instances where we recognize colors, and say that, for example, “these curtains are yellow.” But to acknowledge these simple cases of recognition is not to provide any epistemological advantage to the realist. In the cases of simple recognition, such as takes place with regard to colors, . . . we cannot state informatively what will render the sentence true; when it is true, the faculty of recognition thus attributed to the speaker will be a faculty of unmediated recognition; neither the speaker nor the meaning theorist can say whereby he recognizes the condition as obtaining. (That which renders the sentence true is the very thing of which we are directly aware when we recognize it as being true.)11

One could imagine a situation in which the evil genius, perhaps, made it that through memory mistakes both you and I applied different names to colors on different occasions, but still ended up, through his engineering, agreeing as to colors identified. Dummett, claims that the capacity to recognize colors will not explain agreement over color claims; rather the capacity to agree is the capacity for color recognition. He writes, We shall say that someone knows the meaning of “yellow” just in case his judgments of what is yellow agree, by and large, with those of others. If, then, we call this his “capacity to recognize the color,” his having that capacity is not a hypothesis which serves to explain the agreement of his judgments with those made by others: the agreement is that in which his having that capacity consists.12

11 Dummett, Synthese, p. 106. 12 Logical Basis, p. 314.

Anti-Realism and Critical Realism

85

He argues that if, on the contrary, we hold that the ability for agreement is explained in terms of a grasp of the fulfillment of truth-conditions . . . it could be that everything we agreed on was in fact false and then what would happen to the meaning we attach to our sentences and our use of them?13

Naive realism attempts, mistakenly, to make a full-blown epistemological position out of the capacity for basic recognition. However, Dummett insists that such attempts to argue for the direct awareness of truth fail to cope with the fact of our capacity to be mistaken. He concludes, The naive realist’s notion of immediate awareness, consisting in a direct contact between the knowing subject and the object of his knowledge, is probably in all cases incoherent.14

2. Critical Realism Lonergan, like Dummett, sees the need for an approach to the questions of metaphysics which engages in prior investigations into the nature of the intentional, conscious activities of intelligent and reasonable language users. For Lonergan also, an investigation of such intentional practice will yield a meaning theory which will be crucial for semantics and the further investigation of metaphysical claims. The foundation of Lonergan’s account of knowledge and meaning is his cognitional theory. I shall, then, attempt to provide a brief outline of that theory and its implications for epistemology which will also indicate the way in which Lonergan’s basic positions in these areas may be defended. It could be said that Lonergan’s basic positions on cognition and epistemology can be seen as developments within the tradition of classical antiskeptical argument, as exemplified in the antiskeptical moves employed by Aristotle, Aquinas, and Descartes.15 It may be observed that such antiskeptical responses are often seen as “one-off affairs,” or as “dead-end” signs that, perhaps, deflect certain paths

13 Ibid., p. 314. 14 Synthese, p. 111. 15 It should be observed immediately, however, that Lonergan’s position is as much a critique of the naive realism and “intuitionism” of Descartes as it is a retrieval of what is of genuine value in Descartes’s antiskeptical moves.

86

Insight and Analysis

of philosophical argument without suggesting avenues of positive inquiry. For example, there is an argument that is found in Lonergan’s work, and in the work of other philosophers that the position that “I cannot know what is really so,” is self-destructive; for if the sentence is put forth as a truth claim one is, in fact, claiming “It is really so that I cannot know what is really so.” While one can admit the force of such an argument, and it is difficult to see how one could not, the question can be raised (as I have heard it raised in this context), as to where one goes from there. One way of understanding what Lonergan attempts to do is to see his analysis of the functioning of such self-referential arguments as a way of understanding how one arrived at the point of discarding a position as self-destructive, in order that one may also know where to go from there. The contention is that the broad outlines of this cognitional theory may be verified in one’s own conscious experience of being involved in such operations. And, indeed, the attempt to criticize or dispute the basic outline will itself provide evidence sufficient to affirm the truth of the account. So, in order to criticize or disagree with the account one will have seen or read the marks or sounds through which the account is communicated (or touched the Braille text that is the mode of communication); one will have asked questions as to the meaning of what is communicated, and will have understood something of what it means; and, insofar as one is criticizing, or disagreeing with the account, one will be involved in raising the further question, “Is it so?,” “Is it true?,” and one will have given some answer to that question, one will have arrived at a judgment. In coming to verify this account of cognitional structure one will, Lonergan argues, come to verify the truth of the proposition that one is “a knower.” That is, one will be able to advert to the evidence provided by one’s own conscious activity that one is an individual characterized by the types of cognitional activity identified in the account of cognition. Lonergan writes that arriving at such a judgment is, like any other instance of making a judgment of fact, a matter of understanding: 1. a conditioned, 2. a link between the conditioned and its conditions, and 3. the fulfillment of the conditions. The relevant conditioned is the statement, “I am a knower.” The link between the conditioned and its conditions may be cast in the proposition, I am a knower, if I am a . . . unity . . . characterized by acts of sensing, perceiving,

Anti-Realism and Critical Realism

87

imagining, inquiring, understanding, formulating, reflecting . . . and judging. The fulfillment of the conditions is given in consciousness.16

One feature of this position which it is essential to grasp is that knowledge of self is, in important ways, acquired like other items of factual knowledge. It is a matter of understanding the meaning of propositions concerning the self and its activities, raising the question as to the truth of those propositions, and answering that question on the basis of the evidence of one’s own cognitional activities, activities which will have been utilized in the formulation and raising of the question itself. The problem, then, is not that one starts from some immediate knowledge of self, and then has the difficulty of “getting outside,” to hook up with the rest of the world. Indeed, one may observe how the posing of the problem in these terms itself tacitly assumes the truth of knowledge claims concerning a situation: there is a self, and it really is the case that it is cut off from a world which exists “outside.” Insofar as one has already affirmed the truth of such propositions one has already claimed knowledge of more than the self. What is unusual in the case of self-knowledge is that the evidence that the truth-conditions of propositions concerning the self are fulfilled is given in one’s conscious activity in a way which is wholly unambiguous; there is no need to ask further whether one does make a judgment, or ask a question, once one has adverted to the act either of making a judgment or of asking a question. In this way it could be argued that such knowledge claims prove to be something of an epistemological limit case, or standard, against which other claims, where there is not the same certainty of the fulfillment of truth-conditions, are measured. But the structure of verification in the case of other types of claim is the same, even though that justification does not normally reach the limit where there is no further question as to whether the truth-conditions of the proposition are fulfilled. That I have the experience of feeling and seeing my hands, and that I have no reason to think that I am hallucinating (I think I am in good health), provide evidence for the claim that I have hands and count against the claim that I have not. On Lonergan’s view, such judgments are probable but not certain. As in the case of attempting to verify the proposition “I make judgments,” so with the proposition “I have two hands” verification is a matter of understanding what truth-conditions

16 Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, (San Francisco, CA and London: Harper and Row, 1978), p. 319.

88

Insight and Analysis

would have to be fulfilled were the proposition to be true, and of asking and answering questions as to whether those truth-conditions are given. In the latter case, of course, I cannot claim the certainty for the proposition that G.E. Moore was willing to claim for them, for there are further questions as to whether the truth-conditions are definitely fulfilled: might not the experience be illusory? In such cases we are not certain, for to express the matter in terms from Davidson’s position, we are not sure that our experience of having two hands, our “internal happenings” in this regard, are caused in the “right” way. But, given that we know there are more conditions fulfilled for the propositions relevant to assessing the truth of the statement “I have two hands” than for those that support its negation we may say the judgment is more probable than its negation. Might not an evil genius be deceiving me? Yes, we could grant that he might be, but from the viewpoint of Lonergan’s position, one would distinguish between considering possibilities, on the one hand, and reaching a judgment that is here and now more probable than its rivals, on the other. In this case we have to ask whether there is any evidence that the truth-conditions of the propositions supporting the hypothesis of an evil deceiver are given, and if there is not, then we are not justified in going beyond the evidence that we have to hand, indeed, that we have two hands! The epistemic limit cases, then, are cases in which we do know that the truth-conditions of propositions are unambiguously fulfilled; as in the case of claims to self-knowledge which it would be incoherent to deny. These set the standard, as it were, against which these other, probable judgments are measured. What options remain, then, for the skeptic, given such arguments? Lonergan writes, Am I a knower? The answer, Yes, is coherent, for if I am a knower, I can know that fact. But the answer, No, is incoherent, for if I am not a knower, how could the question be raised and answered by me? No less, the hedging answer, I do not know, is incoherent. For if I know that I do not know, then I am a knower; and if I do not know that I do not know, then I should not answer. Am I a knower? If I am not, then I know nothing. My only course is silence. My only course is not the excused and explained silence of the sceptic, but the complete silence of the animal that offers neither excuse nor explanation for its complacent absorption in merely sensitive routines. For if I know nothing, I do not know excuses for not knowing. If I know nothing, then I cannot know the explanation of my ignorance.17

17 Ibid., p. 321.

Anti-Realism and Critical Realism

89

Lonergan’s analysis highlights a further issue of considerable interest concerning the functioning of self-referential arguments. It is the case that people can genuinely hold skeptical positions such that they deny that anything can be known, or that they make truth claims, or whatever. One may feel that such views are bound up with deep-rooted philosophical confusions. Be that as it may, if refutation of the skeptic is a possibility, how is it that someone can get into the state of ostensibly denying that which they are aware of in the very denial? One may recall here Wittgenstein’s view that to free people from philosophical confusion one needs to point to what, in some way, they “always already knew,” and perhaps one can see this maieutic as operative in the places in On Certainty where Wittgenstein himself offers a “refutation” of a certain form of skepticism.18 But the question is, if the skeptic has “already known” what he knows at the end of the argument against his position, how was he ever a skeptic in the first place? Should we not take Wittgenstein’s “already know” expression here as a kind of metaphor which is, perhaps, worthy of further analysis? Lonergan’s solution to this problem is to distinguish awareness, or consciousness, from knowledge. One may be aware, or conscious of hearing, touching, excogitating, questioning, judging, and asserting, but being so aware does not necessarily entail that one knows that one is involved in such activities. The distinction between awareness, on the one hand, and knowledge-that, on the other, is one also made by J.L. Mackie.19 The distinction between conscious experience and knowledge of that experience, which is made by both Mackie and Lonergan, is not one that one finds often in the literature, and, no doubt, from some philosophical perspectives it appears highly contentious. It is, of course, true that we can apply the expression “knowledge that” in a less restricted way. Ordinary usage suggests as much. So, someone says of what they are engaged in, “Look, I know what I am doing,” and it might appear that one is sponsoring a somewhat strange reform of common usage in insisting that the person does not know what he is doing, but is, rather, conscious of what he is doing. But I think that Lonergan’s and Mackie’s distinction between awareness and knowledge-that, in the “strict” sense, has explanatory power. It does explain, I believe, how it is that one can, in

18 L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, G.E.M. Anscombe and H. von Wright, (eds.) (New York: Harper Torch Books, 1972) #14, #306, #369, #456. 19 J.L. Mackie, “Are There Any Incorrigible Empirical Statements?” in his Logic and Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) pp. 22–40, pp. 33–37.

90

Insight and Analysis

all earnestness, put forth skeptical claims which are actually incoherent, and, furthermore, how one can come to revise those claims on the basis of the evidence of one’s own intentions in putting forth those claims, evidence which one had not adverted to prior to the invitation to do so, offered by the charge of self-refutation brought against one’s argument. I have argued that what is experienced to be the most compelling feature of some of the arguments based on a charge of self-refutation, is that, if one is alert enough, the truth-conditions of such propositions as “I question,” or “I make judgments” may be understood as given in one’s awareness of one’s own activities, and that in a way which is wholly unambiguous. Similarly, such a proposition as “I do not make judgments” may be understood to be falsified by the provision of a counterexample, provided by one’s conscious experience of making such a judgment; one definitely knows that the truth-conditions for the proposition are not given because the truth-conditions of its negation are given. The question as to the incorrigibility of empirical statements naturally arises in this context. J.L. Mackie argues against the view that there are empirical statements which are in principle incorrigible. Mackie’s distinction between “consciousness of” and “knowledge that” is deployed precisely against the view that sensible experiences are in principle incorrigible.20 In accord with Mackie’s approach, I think it might be argued that “incorrigibility” and “corrigibility” are qualities that have to do, not with sense experience, nor with any kind of conscious experience of one’s activities, but have, rather, to do with knowledge-that claims, or judgments. From his analysis of human understanding Lonergan develops an account of meaning in the course of which he treats of the relation between meaning theory and logical semantics. It will not be my aim here to explore these aspects of Lonergan’s work in any detail, but I will highlight some elements that are of significance in comparing and contrasting Lonergan’s position with that of Dummett. As we have seen in the case of Dummett’s meaning theory, so also it is Lonergan’s belief that an understanding of human expression involves an understanding of the propositional attitudes, the conscious intelligent and reasonable operations that characterize meaningful expression. So Lonergan distinguishes between, what he terms “principal” and “instrumental” acts of meaning. He writes, principal acts are formal or full inasmuch as they are constituted by acts of defining, supposing, considering, or by acts of assenting or dissenting;

20 Ibid., pp. 33–37.

Anti-Realism and Critical Realism

91

instrumental acts are sensible manifestations of meaning through gesture, speech and writing.21

In order, then, to understand the meaning of an expression, one needs to understand that it may have its source 1. simply in the experience of the speaker, as in an exclamation, or 2. in artistically ordered experiential elements, as in a song, or 3. in a reflectively tested, intelligent, ordering of experiential elements, as in a statement of fact, or 4. in the addition of acts of will, such as wishes or commands, to intellectual and rational knowledge.22 As for Dummett, so for Lonergan, the adumbration of meaning theory is, in some sense, prior to logical formalization, and provides a way of understanding the semantic task of assigning meanings to the terms and relations of logical formalizations. Such formalizations23 are emergent upon insight into the conditions of knowing and the possible terms of meaning which are correlative to cognitive activity. So principles such as identity and noncontradiction regard the act of judgment, in which we either affirm or deny some proposition as so, not so, probably so or not so. In the case of the principle of excluded middle the options admit of more than affirmation or denial, one may also seek to make distinctions with regard to the meaning of the proposed proposition. So, in his lectures on mathematical logic Lonergan explains, There seems to be no doubt that, as long as knowledge is still in genesis, in potentia, the principle of excluded middle cannot be built into a logical system and so applied indiscriminately. Hence, “intuitionistic” logic possesses a measure of factual truth; and this measure involves the restriction of the

21 Insight, p. 315. 22 Ibid., pp. 315–316. As my aim is to provide no more than a few indications of Lonergan’s philosophy of meaning I omit mention of other relevant passages in Insight, and in the later treatment of meaning in the work Method in Theology. I would note in passing, however, that while the development in Lonergan’s thought on meaning between the earlier and later work is a consistent one, it is my opinion that the treatment of meaning in Method in Theology, while in some ways amplifying the treatment of the earlier work, needs to be situated in the fuller context that Insight provides. I think this is particularly the case with regard to the notion of “intersubjective” meaning. 23 Ibid., p. 576.

92

Insight and Analysis value of logics that accept excluded middle as an automatically operative principle.24

On Lonergan’s view coming to know what is so, what is the truth, involves activities on three interrelated levels of conscious activity. Thus, while logical principles, such as noncontradiction and excluded middle, regard the level of judgment insofar as that level is anticipated on the level of thinking and considering (the level of understanding), so an understanding of such principles is operative at the prior level.25 However, the objective proper to the activities on the level of understanding can be characterized as answering what Aristotle characterized as quid sit? questions, questions which aim at an understanding of the meaning of what we experience. It is the activities of the level of judgment, marshalling, and weighing evidence, and grasping the fulfillment or nonfulfillment of conditions, that answer the question, “is it so?,” raised with regard to the concepts and hypotheses formulated through understanding. Like Frege, then, Lonergan holds that the understanding of a concept or hypothesis will yield the conditions which will constitute the truth-conditions that permit us to investigate whether the concept or hypothesis is true. In the case of self-affirmation, discussed above, then, the understanding of what is meant by the various acts of sensing, imagining, questioning, enjoying insight, formulation, weighing evidence and judging, and what is meant by the idea of “I,” as a unity differentiated by such interrelated conscious activities, provides the truth-conditions that we need to determine as given or not given, in order to reach a conclusion as to the truth of the proposition, “I am a knower.” Lonergan would be in agreement with Dummett that our understanding of a sentence is not immediately a matter of understanding that it must be either true or false. Since coming to know what is so is, on Lonergan’s view, a matter of intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation, it is the case that once a conceptual package has passed the test, so to speak, in terms of our being able to grasp it intelligently, then it may be assessed in terms of its truth-conditions being given or not given.

24 Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, CWL, Vol. 18, McShane, (ed.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. 84. For a discussion of Quantum Logic, influenced by Lonergan’s philosophy, see Patrick Heelan (1970), “Quantum Logic and Classical Logic: Their Respective Roles,” Synthese, 21: 2–33. For Lonergan’s approach to the philosophy of Mathematics, besides the lectures mentioned in this note, see Insight, chapter 8; also, Philip McShane (1962–1963), “The Foundations of Mathematics,” The Modern Schoolman, 40: 373–387. 25 Insight, p. 576.

Anti-Realism and Critical Realism

93

Lonergan would also agree that the term “truth” is in some sense relative to the type of justification we are attempting to provide. Thus, Lonergan distinguishes between mathematical truth, logical truth, and factual truth. He argues that from an analysis of judgment, as a grasp of a conditioned as linked to conditions which are found to be fulfilled, one may move on to provide an account of the meaning of various types of judgment. So in the case of self-affirmation there is a factual judgment. For in this instance the conditioned is the proposition, “I am a knower,” the conditions are the terms and relations of cognitional theory, the link between conditioned and conditions is the definition we provide of the conditioned propositions in terms of the conditions, and the fulfillment is grasped as given through attention to the data of one’s conscious activities. The factual or the real, therefore, will be that known in a judgment that has the fulfillment of its conditions in the data of sense or of consciousness. In the case of other types of judgment whether they are true or not will depend upon whether their conditions are given in the required way. So, for instance, the basic form of judgment can be seen as operative in the case of judgment regarding what Lonergan terms, “analytic propositions” (such propositions can be constructed freely), In analytic propositions the link [between conditioned and conditions] lies in rules of meaning that generate propositions out of partial terms of meaning [such as words] and the fulfilment is supplied by the meaning or definition of the terms.26

However, Lonergan points out that if the meaning theorist, or cognitional theorist, makes distinctions between types of truth relative to constructive techniques in mathematics and logic his own performance in doing so indicates a contrast between such types of truth and the factual truth he is claiming to know about reality, the reality of the operations of those involved in the mathematical and logical techniques. He writes, When one states that a statement is merely logical, one means really and truly it is merely logical. It follows that one cannot suppose all statements are merely logical, for then it would be merely logical that they are merely logical, and it would be impossible to say that any really and truly is merely logical.27

26 Insight, pp. 315–316. 27 Lonergan, Collection: The Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Vol. 5, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 191.

94

Insight and Analysis

To say that the way we know truth about the world, or reality, is known in a way appropriate to human beings (rather than to angels or God) may be to do nothing more than to affirm a trivial truth. But to claim that we know truth as relative to our procedures of justification may be a way of suggesting that “our truth” is in some way “relative” to us, and is, then, perhaps not really truth at all. That such a position as described appears rather confusing is to the point. For despite their subtlety and ingenuity, positions such as those of Kant and Hegel, which expend so much energy on describing the limitations of our cognitive powers, ultimately end up in the incoherent position which claims it is really so that one cannot know what is really so. Further, as Lonergan’s work indicates, one’s advertence to the fact of one’s recognition of the falsity of such incoherent positions is itself an item of genuine knowledge. From the paradigm instance of self-affirmation one may grasp that one knows it is the case that one is a knower because one grasps that, unambiguously, the conditions for the proposition to be true are given in one’s experience. Reflection on such an instance of genuine knowledge demonstrates that the intelligent agent, language user, is rationally aware that if the truth-conditions for a proposition are given the proposition is true of the world; if they are not, the proposition is not true of the world.

3. A Critique of Dummett’s Anti-Realism Given the account of some of the basic elements in both Dummett’s and Lonergan’s positions, it should already be clear where some of the notable differences arise. Dummett’s attachment to the Wittgensteinian view of knowledge of other minds and the way we justify judgments concerning our own conscious states and those of others would seem to be at odds with Lonergan’s account of self-affirmation. Clearly, Dummett’s view that cases of primitive recognition are uninformative for debates over realism is not one shared by Lonergan. I will suggest, however, that Dummett’s differences with Wittgenstein do not appear consistent with his Wittgensteinian commitments. Before turning to that issue, it will be necessary to answer the Wittgensteinian criticism of attempts to provide the kind of arguments for self-knowledge we find in Lonergan’s work. No doubt one must understand Wittgenstein’s cavils against introspective psychology as standing within the tradition of the Humean critique of Cartesian psychology. In that tradition the idea of “looking within” to “see” an inner self and its activities is regarded as something preposterous.

Anti-Realism and Critical Realism

95

But since Lonergan is as insistent as Richard Rorty that knowing is not simply a matter of “looking,” he also insists that introspection, understood on the analogy of “inward looking,” is absurd. Attention to one’s cognitional activities is possible, he would argue, and because to look at something is a way in which we attend to things, this does not entail that every form of attention, or noticing is a “looking.” The kind of first-person assertions Lonergan’s self-affirmation experiment implies could be deemed as illegitimate on the basis of what has been termed Wittgenstein’s doctrine of avowals. Wittgenstein came to the conclusion that such self-referring statements as “I am in pain” are to be understood, not in terms of propositions whose truth or falsity can be evaluated, but as pain-manifesting behavior.28 In response to this line of objection I would say that Wittgenstein was correct in recognizing that some expressions may be of a type that is common to the intersubjective communications between animals, humans, and humans and animals. So the brick falls on my foot, I yell out in pain, and my dog, startled, barks. As we saw above, in the discussion of Lonergan’s identification of different types of expression, Lonergan also recognizes such cases of “elementary expression.” However, I feel that Wittgenstein’s mistake is to assimilate all types of self-referential expression to this elementary kind, whether such expression be a report of pain states or of other matters concerning that of which one is aware. Wittgenstein suggests that such phrases are taught to children as types of pain behavior. But this overlooks the fact that such sentences are also taught as part of the “game” of self-referring expressions. A child might learn a phrase in, say, German which her father utters when in pain. In that case the child picks up no more than that the phrase is a kind of pain behavior; the child does not learn what the words mean. But in the case of the child’s native tongue such self-referring expressions are learned as part of a more complex and articulated linguistic capacity. As we noted above, J.L. Mackie also argues that there are cases when we have fleeting or complex experiences where it is difficult to be confident in reporting that of which we were quite conscious at the time. Mackie, therefore, also argues that one should not push the doctrine of avowals too far.29 As the description of one’s pain states becomes more intricate and discerning, so one can observe that one’s reports of, or claims about those states become more vulnerable to revision—perhaps one will revise

28 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, G.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, (eds.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), p. 244. 29 Mackie, Logic and Knowledge, p. 35.

96

Insight and Analysis

one’s description as one remembers more detail, as one realizes that “shooting” rather than “lancing” would be a more accurate description of what one experienced, or is experiencing in pain. I see no reason to forbid the assessment of first-person self-referring claims when these are clearly cases of assertions made on the basis of the evidence, the evidence of one’s conscious experience in which the truth-conditions of the relevant propositions are grasped as given or not given. Of course the claim “I am in pain” is not one the person making it can reasonably doubt if he is aware of the fulfillment of conditions for the truth of the claim in their experience. This is the view of the matter Lonergan’s position suggests. One may further note that in order to “play the game” of lying about pain, certain conditions have to be met. In order to lie, the liar has to be aware that the truth-conditions of the sentence “I am in pain” are not given in his experience; if they were, lying would not be possible here. But then from this example it is clear that one is able to distinguish what conditions need to be fulfilled if the assertion “I am in pain” is to be true. Similarly, with knowledge of others’ mental states and pain states one has to be aware of the spectrum of human reactions, responses, and assertions which range from spontaneous, intersubjective reactions to others’ pain manifestations, to cool and critical evaluations of the evidence provided by apparent pain manifestations. So one reaches out to grab the small child who cries out after burning his finger, but even young siblings learn to be discerning in the case of each other’s tricks and fibs about putative pain states. The 3-year-old who is disturbed by the noise the car makes when her mother crunches the gears may insist that the car is in pain. As part of disabusing the child of her idea that pain states are to be ascribed to the machine, the mother may well explain that “cars cannot feel pain as you or I do, dear.” In such an instance it is obvious that the mother is making an appeal to the child’s ability to understand the terms involved in the relevant truth-conditions on the basis of the child’s own experience. I do not, then, find anything compelling about the Wittgensteinian arguments Dummett invokes against an analysis of at least some cases of pain ascription, or knowledge of other minds. There are claims about other minds that involve an understanding of truth-conditions on the basis of one’s own conscious experience, and the probable judgment that such conditions obtain in the experience of others, judgments the probability of which is, in part, relative to the degree of observable evidence. Turning to Dummett’s treatment of recognitional capacities and cases of simple recognition I think similar considerations apply. Human beings and animals have basic recognitional capacities that appear to have to do with the genetically inherited equipment increasing probabilities for

Anti-Realism and Critical Realism

97

survival. So babies recognize the voice of the mother, and may reach out for the mother’s breast. This is, no doubt, the domain to be investigated by the science of psychology. As Dummett’s position suggests, such cases are, from the viewpoint of the meaning theorist, basic: they are not cases upon which he can throw light. However, in the case of self-affirmation of oneself as a knower, one is in a domain in which the meaning theorist, or the cognitional theorist may throw light upon the rational and intentional practices of raising and answering questions which are involved. Further, there are myriad instances of human recognition which appear to fall into the category of elementary recognition but which, in fact, are cases of intelligent and reasonable knowledge, or recognition, which has become habitual and spontaneous. Tying our shoelaces and naming colors according to linguistic convention are things that as adults we do with ease. But such capacities, we may recall, once took us time to learn. Dummett tends to emphasize a distinction between knowledge-that, on the one hand, and practical knowledge on the other. But I think one ought not to push such a distinction too far. In learning a practical ability, acquiring a habit, one is also involved in knowledge-that. So in learning to tie one’s laces, or play the violin, one learns that such and such a movement does achieve the desired purpose while another does not. In learning color recognition one learns that what one is experiencing is called “red,” in other words what “we,” one’s parents, teacher, peers call “red.” In the case of a judgment about a simple matter like color, then, my insight which associates a word with a particular experience is that which allows me to understand the truth-conditions involved in ascribing “red,” say, to some experience, and my judgment that “this is red” is a matter of my attention to the data, understanding that data as a fulfillment of truthconditions. Dummett argues that we can imagine the evil genius as confusing us as regards what each one would call this or that color, or even regarding my ability to remember enough consistently to apply color names from one day to the next. But in Dummett’s example it is clear that even if what today one calls “red” yesterday one called “yellow,” insofar as one has any capacity at all, one still retains the capacity to raise and answer the question, “Is this red?” in terms of an ability to understand “red,” in one’s ideolect, and grasp that the truth-conditions for the proposition “This is red” are or are not given. So even in Dummett’s thought experiment, where one is irretrievably locked into one’s ideolect by tricks of memory, enough is allowed so that if one were now looking at an object which one experienced as of two different colors, one would be able to recognize that the truth-conditions of the proposition “This is red” were fulfilled in one area but not in the other.

98

Insight and Analysis

What Dummett is worried about here is that were we to acknowledge the “truth-condition” account of recognition or judgment it might mean that everything we agreed on was false; it would be possible for our agreements to be the result of, perhaps, a preestablished harmony between privately understood ideolects. I think the response to such worries suggested by Lonergan’s position is to advert to the distinction between judgments of possibility, on the one hand, and judgments as to what is the case, or what probably is the case, on the other. We can indulge in all manner of thought experiments as to possibilities. So Dummett, it will be recalled, considers the possibility of Martians predicting human behavior without understanding human language as manifesting intelligent, conscious practice, as quite intelligible. In this regard he is in the tradition of Descartes, imagining that, perhaps, everyone else is really an unthinking robot, or that the evil genius is deceiving us. In the discussion of Lonergan’s position, above, it was pointed out that, de facto, the attempt to argue that I cannot definitely know anything, because of memory mistakes, illusion, evil genius or whatever was incoherent because such attempts result in claiming to know that I cannot or do not know. Further, since grasping the incoherence of such positions involves grasping the fact that such claims are instances of judgment, such understanding is a grasp that the truth-conditions for the proposition “I judge” are given. And one may in a similar fashion go on to grasp that the conditions of the other propositions on self-knowledge, such as “I see, imagine, question, understand” and so forth, are given in one’s conscious experience in an unambiguous way. If one goes on to other proposed judgments such as “I have two hands,” “the evil genius deceives me in cases where I am not certain,” or “we are all really locked into our own ideolects,” while one can admit the possibility of the alternatives it is a different matter when it comes to assessing which hypothesis is the more probable. So, as was noted above, in cases such as “I have two hands” we do not have judgments that grasp that the truth-conditions are unambiguously given (as in the case of the judgments of cognitional theory and derived therefrom). Rather, in such cases, as in the sciences, we reach probable judgments based on the available evidence. So given my mastery and familiarity with the circumstances it is more probable that “I have two hands” is true than that it is false. However, were these circumstances to change, things might be different. Suppose I wake up in hospital, in pain and bandaged up; I certainly feel that I have two hands, but now doctors and loved ones, whom I trust, begin to explain to me that I have been in an accident and that I have lost my hands. Similarly, with the hypotheses of an evil genius, or of others being mindless robots, or even of minds that I am never

Anti-Realism and Critical Realism

99

really in agreement with about meanings, one has to say that all the evidence we have makes such judgments improbable. While it is possible that the cause of wars is that the moon needs feeding, or that all the areas of communicative agreement between myself and my wife are illusory (we live in our own ideolects) the simpler explanation of the evidence in both cases will involve us saying that such hypotheses are probably not true. With regard to probable judgments, which constitute the vast majority of our judgments, I would agree with Roman Bonzon’s criticism of Dummett’s attempt to drive a wedge between the notion of justification and that of establishing truth or falsity.30 As Bonzon writes, Conditions, the realist would point out, are not justificatory of a statement unless they are justificatory of the truth of the statement; and this means that any identification of them as being justificatory of a statement cannot be conceptually isolated from, let alone be given conceptual priority over, an identification of the conditions whose obtaining would render the statement in question true.31

Dummett argues that there is nothing to be learnt from cases of simple recognition in which we grasp that the truth-condition for a proposition is given. I have argued that even apparently simple cases of recognition, such as judgments about color, may be cases in which the process of attention to data, understanding the data and raising and answering questions about the truth or falsity of one’s understanding may have become habitual. Clearly, the key contrast between Lonergan’s position and Dummett’s is to be found in the way Lonergan argues that in self-affirmation one does have instances in which one grasps nontrivial truth-conditions as given in conscious experience. Such instances are limit cases in which one can recognize the justification of the assertion of the truth of the proposition “I am a knower” as grounded in a knowledge of the fulfillment of the relevant truth-conditions. How, then, does Lonergan distinguish his “critical realist” position from the “naive realist” whom Dummett criticizes, quite rightly on Lonergan’s account, for placing emphasis upon the “immediate knowledge” of our basic experience of recognition? Lonergan writes, Now what does Jack [the naive realist] know when he looks at his hands? What does Jill [the idealist] know when she looks at hers? Two answers are possible,

30 Roman Bonzon (November, 1992), “Anti-Anti-Realism,” Philosophical Studies, 68: 141–169. 31 Ibid., p. 155.

100

Insight and Analysis

so Jack may say that his hand is out there in front of his face, and Jill may say that her hand at least seems to be out there in front of her face. Nor is the difference between the two answers difficult to detect. When Jack says “is,” he is not reporting what he knows by sight alone; he also has made a judgment; he has added Denken to Anschauen. When Jill says “seems” she is limiting her report to sight alone; the act of reporting involves thought and judgment; but what is reported is simply and solely what is known by her seeing, the appearance of a hand in front of her face.

Distinguishing his own position as that of the “critical realist,” Lonergan identifies the way out of this impasse . . . As the idealist is not impressed by the naive realist, so the critical realist is impressed neither by the one nor by the other. Against the naive realist of the type in question he maintains that the essence of the objectivity of human knowing does not stand revealed in seeing or in any other single cognitional operation . . . Against the idealist of the type in question the critical realist maintains that sense does not know appearances. It is just as much a matter of judgment to know that an object is not real but apparent, as it is to know that an object is not apparent but real. Sense does not know appearances, because sense alone is not human knowing, and because sense does not possess the objectivity of full human knowing. By our senses we are given, not appearance, not reality, but data. By our consciousness which is not an inner sense, we are given, not appearance, not reality, but data. Further, while it is true enough that the data of sense result in us from the action of external objects, it is not true that we know this by sense alone; we know it as we know anything else, by experiencing, understanding and judging.32

I observed above that there is a significant measure of agreement between Dummett’s and Lonergan’s approaches insofar as they both aim at an analysis of the intentional operations of language users in order to provide a basis for a theory of meaning. While a detailed exploration of parallels and divergences would require a more exhaustive treatment, I will highlight here an area of divergence which is not unrelated to the questions concerning knowledge of other minds and recognition which have concerned us. In my exposition of some of the basic elements of Lonergan’s position, I drew attention to the way his analysis of the distinction between consciousness, in its various modes, and knowledge throws light upon Wittgenstein’s somewhat paradoxical use of the expression “to know” in his rebuttal of the skeptic. I would suggest that while Dummett has much to say on the distinction between, what he terms, “implicit knowledge” and “explicit knowledge”

32 Lonergan, Collection, pp. 216–218.

Anti-Realism and Critical Realism

101

that is very illuminating, nevertheless it is the case that some of what he has to say remains paradoxical in rather the same way as the Wittgensteinian expression. For both Lonergan and Dummett the distinction between what is implicit and what is explicit in human rational practice plays an important role in the adumbration of a theory of meaning. On Lonergan’s view there is a distinction between the implicit and explicit in terms of the intelligent and reasonable awareness which is implicit in our acts of questioning, thinking, conceiving, and judging, on the one hand, and our (explicit) knowledge that we operate in this way achieved in a correct cognitional theory. There is a further distinction between, what one might term, an implicit element in knowledge and an explicit element which Lonergan describes as a distinction between insight and conception. Both these activities are, on his view, conscious intelligent activities, but it can be said that conceptual formulation is, in some sense, a making explicit of what is implicit in prior acts of understanding or insight. Lonergan argues that the clearest examples which illustrate the distinction between insight and conceptual expression are to be had in the history of mathematics and logic. He observes that the ideal of Euclid’s geometry is to express in concepts, or axioms, what is understood in understanding geometry. However, as later geometricians have observed, often the insights involved have not been conceptually expressed in the system, but simply presupposed. So as Philip McShane, following Lonergan, notes, some of the insights operative in Euclidean geometry were not crystallized into axioms, or concepts, until M. Pasch performed the task in 1890.33 Other instances of the distinction between insight and conception may be found in the experience of teaching and learning. The experience of having to communicate the same insight in different ways for different students is a familiar one for those who teach. Equally common is the experience of attempting to express in a conceptual package just what one has understood, one’s insight, and realizing one has failed to do so. In some of the recent literature on the philosophy of mind one finds parallels with Lonergan’s distinction. So, John Searle makes use of the Wittgensteinian distinction between saying and showing in a way which approximates to Lonergan’s distinction between insight and conception. Searle points out that we often show that we understand something, without explicitly saying that we do—indeed, the saying

33 Philip McShane, Randomness, Statistics and Emergence (Dublin and London: Gill and Macmillan, 1971), p. 89.

102

Insight and Analysis

explicitly may be difficult.34 Further, some of Daniel Dennett’s criticisms of J. Fodor’s “mentalese” thesis take the form of parables that are, I think, nice illustrations of the distinction between insight and conceptual formulation.35 We observed above the way in which Dummett illustrates his distinction between what is implicit and what explicit in knowledge by illustrating implicit knowledge in terms of the following of some grammatical rule that we have not explicitly affirmed to be true. Similarly, we can take it that Frege’s analysis of questioning as including an anticipation of the fulfillment or nonfulfillment of truth-conditions of a proposition is another example of such implicit rule-following. The distinction, Dummett argues, is between knowing the proposition which expresses the rule, and knowing that the proposition is true (the latter being explicit knowledge). But there are surely problems with this distinction. One can make a distinction between knowing, or understanding, the proposition “there is a mouse behind the cooker” and knowing that this proposition is true. But can we so readily apply a like distinction to cases in which people operate in accord with grammatical rules, or the rule involved in asking questions? When the grammarian gets across the point to someone that they have always operated in accord with a rule concerning what the grammarian terms “noun” cases, can we suppose that the individual has always had those formulated propositions, which the grammarian uses, running through his mind as propositions? It is hard to believe that a 3-year-old, who can ask questions as to whether or not the dog is in the garden, has in mind Frege’s formulated propositions concerning the anticipation of truth-conditions in questioning, when he does so. Yet, we would want to say that he does act, and act consciously, in accord with the rule that Frege’s formulation expresses. It would probably not be difficult to establish that the child did not know the meaning of the German or English words required to give anything like an adequate expression of the Fregean propositions concerning the nature of questioning. I think, then, that

34 John Searle, Intentionality (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983), chapter 6. So Lonergan writes, “If one is saying, one is conceiving. If one is conceiving and saying, one has already gone beyond the insight . . .” (Understanding and Being: The Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Vol. 5, M. Morelli, E. Morelli, F. Crowe, R. Doran, and T. Daly, (eds.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 40). 35 Dennett tells the story of a boy selling lemonade who, on being confronted by a customer, recognizes that he has made a mistake with the customer’s change. Dennett’s analysis of what we can say regarding the boy’s awareness of his mistake shows that a simplistic account of “concepts running through his mind” is not a very convincing option. See, Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 84–88.

Anti-Realism and Critical Realism

103

Dummett’s distinction between knowing the proposition (expressing a rule), and knowing that it is true, will not really do the work we want it to. In such cases Lonergan would distinguish between the different types of consciousness or awareness that are present in the differing acts of attention to experience, questioning, understanding, and judging, on the one hand, and, on the other, our insight into those activities, conceptual formulation concerning them (forming propositions), and judgment regarding those formulations; the latter explication is achieved only through the analysis of the meaning theorist or cognitional theorist.36 And I think such an approach avoids the difficulty involved in saying that someone, a small child for example, knows a proposition, expressing a rule, which may be a fairly complex grammatical or philosophical conceptual package. One of the metaphysical concerns that motivates Dummett’s investigation of the rational practices of language users regards the reality of the past. How do we know that there is a fixed state of affairs, which we refer to as “the past,” which will render our statements about it true or false? It is in this context that Dummett recalls Russell’s skeptical question about the past: how do we know that the world did not begin only 5 minutes ago?37 Looking at this question from the perspective of cognitional theory there are one or two observations we can make. If I look behind me I can make the judgment “I experience something blue”; if I turn my head again I can make another judgment, “I experience something grey.”38 In both cases I am aware that I make a reasonable judgment on the basis of the data of my experience, and with regard to what I understand by the terms involved: such judgments are a grasp that the truth-conditions of the relevant propositions are given. However, I can make the further judgment that when I make the judgment concerning the grey object, I am no longer experiencing as present the data which provided the evidential fulfilling of conditions for the judgment that “I experience something blue”; I am still aware of the truth of that latter judgment, for I am still aware that the truth-conditions were given, but I am also aware

36 Dummett discusses “awareness” (Logical Basis, pp. 97–100). His examples of the way one may be in a certain state, and then, in response to an inquiry of another, report on one’s mental state illustrate the difference between consciousness and knowledge-that about one’s consciousness. However, for the most part, his treatment of awareness is in terms of what I have described above as judgments that have become habitual and spontaneous. 37 Dummett, Synthese, p. 112. 38 To please the idealist or phenomenalist I can say that I have “the experience” of turning my head back and forth.

104

Insight and Analysis

that they are not presently given. Such a “thought experiment” may provide an instance in which one can come to know that the truth-conditions for both a past judgment and a present judgment were and are given. But one may also note that the past judgment has an influence on the next stage of my reasoning: I need to make one judgment before the other in order to construct my piece of reasoning about past and present judgments. However, if one moves beyond such pieces of personal biography, what is one to say of large-scale skeptical questions such as the one raised by Russell? I should say that in such cases we are in the same situation as discussed earlier with regard to skeptical questions about other minds, evil geniuses controlling many of our actions, and so on. Such hypotheses, including the hypothesis about the world starting 5 minutes ago, can be entertained as possibilities. However, when one embarks upon the process of attempting to provide evidence for the truth of such hypotheses, then one has to employ Ockham’s razor to arrive at the more probable judgment. It may be possible for God to be constantly annihilating this keyboard upon which I am writing and creating look-alikes with such speed that I neither see nor feel the change. But if I have no evidence for such an hypothesis, the more probable judgment is that this is not occurring, and that it is the selfsame keyboard that remains. If there is no experience of change, there is no evidence for the judgment that there is change. Similar considerations apply to the case of some global deception which hides from us the fact that the world really began 5 minutes ago. I turn, finally, to the question as to whether Dummett’s abandonment of some central theses of Wittgenstein’s late thought and his attachment to others is entirely consistent. In order to examine this question we may reflect upon Dummett’s own performance, as it were, in arguing for the meaning theory he puts forth. Dummett informs us that the way a semantic theory may be criticized or assessed is in terms of how adequate or inadequate an account of language the theory is.39 We might observe in passing that Dummett’s own rational practice in putting forth and arguing for his meaning theory is an attempt to provide a correct or true theory of language use. Recalling Bonzon’s remarks on Dummett’s attempt to separate justification, on the one hand, from establishing that the truth-conditions of a theory are fulfilled, on the other, we can say that, clearly, in the case of his own theory, Dummett is trying to justify it as a true account of human language use; the justification of the theory is not in terms of how amusing it is, or how aesthetically pleasing it is. There is

39 Logical Basis, p. 301.

Anti-Realism and Critical Realism

105

no doubt that Dummett is aware of the shortcomings of the theory, and that some elements within it are better established than others. The theory is, then, held to be probable, but it is argued, as with scientific theory, that it is more probable than some alternatives because in part, at least, it is better supported by and more sensitive to the evidence provided by the data on human language use. However, not only is the type of justification sought for the theory not of the aesthetic type, but it is not simply in terms of instrumentalist prediction. For Dummett informs us that theories predicting human actions and speech sounds could, conceivably, be quite successful without being a correct or true account of human linguistic meaning. Such is the import of his parable about the predictive abilities of Martians. What data, or evidence, then, would such merely predictive theories fail to take account of? The answer Dummett gives us is that it is the conscious and intentional propositional attitudes of human beings. In refusing to pay attention to such psychological data Wittgenstein failed to achieve a proper characterization of linguistic meaning. As we have observed, this psychological domain includes, on Dummett’s account, such phenomena as ideolect deviation, implicit and explicit knowledge and “awareness.” However, the question arises as to how one is to attempt to verify the constructions of the meaning theorist regarding these cognitional phenomena. When the grammarian attempts to get someone to understand that he has, in fact, been following a particular rule in his linguistic behavior not adverted to before, how is the individual concerned to verify what is claimed? Surely, by attention to the data constituted by his own awareness. An individual or group of individuals may come to find that a grammarian’s rule does or does not adequately state the necessary and sufficient conditions of some linguistic practice. Naturally, such evaluation will take place in terms of reflection on instances of use. But as Dummett insists, by such instances we mean not simply the sounds made and the responses which occurred, but the intentions involved in making the sounds and in responding to them in a particular way. Do I, in fact, act in accord with a rule that is expressed in an adequate way by the grammarian or is my acting totally random, in accord with no particular rule that I am aware of? Such particular instances, in which we attend to the data of consciousness in order to verify or call into question a proposed hypothesis, suggest the more general criteria to be invoked in assessing a meaning theory having the kind of psychological commitments evident in Dummett’s theory. Is it the case that I and other language users are conscious of such phenomena as implicit and explicit knowledge, questions as anticipating truth-conditions and the like, which are proposed in Dummett’s meaning theory? One can

106

Insight and Analysis

hardly think that the propositions in which Dummett expresses his theory constitute merely trivial truth-conditions. It is one thing to suppose that fellow feeling involves the ascription of pain to another, in terms of the fulfillment of a “trivial” truth-condition (“he is in pain”); it is quite another to claim that the truth-conditions of a complex theory of intentional propositional attitudes are so trivial. Yet, in the latter case, are we not attempting to achieve knowledge of “minds,” both one’s own and others’? In this regard, I would say that Wittgenstein’s approach was more consistent than Dummett’s. For once one has denied the possibility of knowledge of other minds in terms of the ascription of fulfilled truth-conditions in cases such as judgments about pain states, one should not permit such knowledge in the case of other conscious states and activities such as propositional attitudes. In this chapter, I have attempted a critical comparison of some of the positions basic to the philosophies of Michael Dummett and Bernard Lonergan. Given the scope and complexity of the work of these two philosophers a brief treatment of their positions such as is offered in the present chapter is in no way intended as exhaustive. Clearly, I have highlighted the differences between Dummett’s anti-realism and critical realism and have argued against the former and in favor of the latter. The primary goal of the paper has, then, been a critique of Dummett’s work. However, I have also wished to draw attention to points of convergence between the two philosophies. Most important among such areas of convergence is the way both philosophers attempt an investigation of human rational practice in order to ground a meaning theory. Further, both Dummett and Lonergan attempt to move forward from such theories on cognition and meaning to tackle the questions of semantics within various domains, including that of metaphysics. Finally, I have drawn attention to the manner in which Dummett’s position is the closer to Lonergan’s insofar as it moves away from Wittgenstein’s “neo-behaviorism.” And I have contended that Dummett’s continued attachments to Wittgenstein’s position are both the source of weaknesses in his philosophy, and that they are inconsistent with the anti-Wittgensteinian elements in his approach.

Part 3 Post-Continental Trends

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 6

Badiou’s Metaphysical Basis for Ethics I One of the most remarkable developments in Anglo-American or analytical philosophy in the last two or three decades has been the widespread revival of metaphysics. The new work in metaphysics among analysts demonstrates a willingness to go beyond the more modest “descriptive” metaphysics that Peter Strawson advocated in analytical circles in the 1960s, so as to embrace, if necessary, more ambitious projects in “revisionary” metaphysics.1 During the same period it appeared that continental philosophy had turned its back on traditional metaphysics, declaring it impossible in the name of one or another thesis concerning the “end of philosophy.” Deconstructionist or post-structuralist thinkers might explain that “metaphysics” was inevitable insofar as by our language we are “condemned” to it, but they also argued that one could no longer pursue metaphysics “seriously,” as had philosophers in the Western, and indeed non-Western, traditions. However, as the work of Alain Badiou becomes increasingly well known in the English-speaking world the intriguing question arises as to whether we are not witnessing a revival of “serious” metaphysics in the continental world of philosophy. In the preface to the recent translation into English of his major work L’Être et l’Événement, first published in France in the late 1980s, Badiou is explicit concerning his desire to bridge the gap between the continental world of philosophy, with its concern for the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of life, and the analytical world which has been that in which philosophical research into logic, science, and mathematics has been most vigorously pursued.2 A counterexample to the claim that serious metaphysics has not been a concern in recent continental philosophy can be pointed to in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze’s Nietzsche-inspired metaphysical investigations do indeed manifest a serious concern with metaphysics, but his ultimate aim appears to be that of showing how, ultimately, being is the unintelligible. Deleuze’s philosophy has certainly proved an inspiration to

1 On the renaissance of metaphysics in analytical philosophy see: Andrew Beards, Method in Metaphysics: Lonergan and the Future of Analytical Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 2 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, translated by Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2007) pp. xiii–xiv.

110

Insight and Analysis

Badiou, but Badiou is also a severe critic of that metaphysics.3 In its stead, Badiou proposes a metaphysics of being, of reality as mathematical. It is an ontology which Badiou sees as implicit in ancient discussions of the “one and the many,” but it is an ontology which only comes into its own, Badiou believes, in the era of modern set-theory and mathematical logic. Badiou, then, is a continental philosopher who is skeptical of the skepticism of much recent continental philosophy. He is skeptical regarding the deconstructionist approach to the philosophical tradition in general, and he believes that a serious ontology in terms of set-theoretic, mathematical constructions is a possibility. Besides being a metaphysician Badiou is also an ethicist and a political philosopher. His own intellectual development has taken place in a life of radical political activity inspired by a MaoistMarxism, and his concern for the plight of North African immigrants to France is very evident in his writing. The social and political are always present as themes even in his work on ontology. In fact his whole philosophical project is seen as a “radical” and emancipatory exercise. Not long after the original French publication of Being and Event Badiou wrote a short work on ethics. In the preface to a later edition of his Ethics Badiou recognizes that the book was written in response to a request for a fairly accessible work, and that it may have shortcomings attendant upon such a commissioned exercise.4 In the preface to the English version of his Ethics Badiou does identify one serious problem in one area of his argument, however, he continues by affirming the overall worth of the book and his commitment to what he wrote.5 The position Badiou argues for on ethics is very much dependant upon metaphysical foundations, as Badiou himself attests, and so I intend in the chapter to tackle key themes in the Ethics before moving on to a critical evaluation of some of the metaphysical positions which underpin these. In the scope of a chapter such as this I do not intend to give an exhaustive account or critique of Badiou’s metaphysics as this is outlined in Being and Event and in the more recent work, which modifies some of the earlier positions regarding the phenomenon of the “event.” 6 However, I hope in the course of the chapter to highlight questions and problems which emerge for Badiou’s enterprise in the area of the method adopted to justify the positions taken on ontology and ethics.

3 See Alain Badiou, Deleuze: La clamour de l’être (Paris: Hachette, 1997). 4 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, translated by Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001). 5 Ibid., pp. lvi–lviii. 6 Alain Badiou, L’Être et l’événement:Tome 2, Logiques de mondes (Paris: Seuil, 2006).

Badiou’s Metaphysical Basis for Ethics

111

II The anthropological vision central to Badiou’s Ethics emerges early in the book as Badiou draws attention to the way we admire and are inspired by the perseverance some human beings have shown in the face of torture and repression. This ability to persevere in the cause of some truth in the face of repression is that which moves human beings out of mere animality.7 The human individual as such is only a “someone” and ontologically this “someone” is nothing permanent or definite. In accord with his mathematical metaphysics Badiou holds that all apparent ontological entities are, in reality, only multiples of multiples of multiples. This is no less the case with human persons. Badiou writes, “Every representation of myself is the fictional imposition of a unity upon infinite component multiplicities.”8 However, insofar as a “someone” enters into a larger political or social whole, such a whole being a “subject,” that “someone” enters the realm of the “immortal.” When human persons enter into “truth-processes,” such as scientific research and discovery, human love relationships, and political movements, their mere animal nature is transcended and they become concerned with the coming about of truth. Mere animal self-interest, selfpreservation is transcended in this way so that “disinterested-interest” emerges: the scientist is “interested” in verifying a hypothesis, but is, or should be, “disinterested” in his own animal concerns insofar as his scientific objectives are the issue. The fundamental ethical norm for Badiou is, therefore, the precept he takes over from Lacan: “Keep going” in fidelity to the truth-processes in science, human love or political commitment. Reaching up to “good and evil” is a task, a struggle for self-concerned human persons, and the temptations to turn from the endeavor or to mistake authentic events in the truth-process for counterfeits are sources from which “evil” arises. The “immortal” is not anything beyond this world, since Badiou is committed to a physicalist and materialist ontology. But truth is that which transcends the merely individual opinions and self-interested perspectives of the human animal, and goes beyond the shallow chatter of Western life dominated by the media and economic “necessities.” Badiou develops his version of metaethics further in the book through comparison and contrast with, what he sees as, the bogus, “philosophically justified” ethical views on offer in our contemporary capitalist democracies. The ethics of “natural rights” are a prime target. Since the human someone

7 Ibid., pp. 11–12. 8 Ibid., p. 54.

112

Insight and Analysis

in his or her animal nature is, for Badiou, “below” good and evil, to talk of them as having rights is fallacious. Rather, neo-Kantian rights talk is merely a mask concealing the subterfuges of modern, bourgeois capitalist regimes as they control and manipulate public opinion. Such manipulation results in the cynical exclusion of dispossessed immigrants, such as the sans-papiers in France, and other groups such as factory workers. Tolerance is, then, only a myth and Western democracies control public opinion by proclaiming that policies flow from the economic necessities of the financial “realities” of life.9 One is reminded in all this of the challenging expression of Herbert Marcuse, “the tyranny of tolerance.” Western democracies have their own propaganda machinery in place so that the media in the modern West frightens us into submission with the “atrocities” that follow inevitably, it is claimed, from political radicalism and an upsetting of the status quo. The contemporary consumerist, Western lifestyle is really a nihilism without genuine goals, and while being terrified by the sight of death and disruption, as these are portrayed in the media, Western democracies also manifest a lurid fascination with this “other” of death; according to Badiou Western nihilism exhibits a morbid “death-wish.”10 Badiou’s pungent criticisms in the Ethics certainly bring to mind the style and aims evident in a work like Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Following in the tradition of that work, Badiou strives to uncover the way various philosophical positions on ethics have wittingly or unwittingly supported the current worldview crafted and cultivated by capitalist democracies. His attack on libertarian natural-rights has already been mentioned, but he also has in his sights the ethics of “human dignity.” He reminds us that those who argue for euthanasia on the grounds that the old and infirm lose their dignity and should be, therefore, allowed to free themselves of this undignified state, make a common cause with the ethics of Nazism.11 Badiou is critical of bioethics in general and believes it is behind discriminatory practices in health care which attempt to justify allocations of resources through the decisions of health care ethics committees.12 Also targeted for attack are the communitarian political ethics of Hannah Arendt and the communicative ethics of Jürgen Habermas. Social communication is the exchange of mere “opinions,” the exchange of the skewed viewpoints of the self-interested animal, according to Badiou, and not the coming to be

9 10 11 12

Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., pp. 38–39. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., pp. 35–38.

Badiou’s Metaphysical Basis for Ethics

113

of truth. He asserts that, “Every truth deposes opinions” and that “opinions are representations without truth.”13 As opposed to Arendt’s ideal of political consensus Badiou claims that every genuine emancipation puts an end to consensus.14 Badiou is particularly scathing when he turns to the ethics of the “other” and Levinas’ contribution.15 At worst the language of the “other” has been hijacked by Western politicians and is used in political sermons which purport to diffuse the Western liberal idea of equality. But, as we have seen, the vision of the toleration of the “other” is a ruse disguising policies that are in reality discriminatory. At best, Levinas’ ethics of the “other” derives from his Jewish faith, as one can see from the place which God as the ultimate guarantee of otherness has in Levinas’ system. The criticism of Levinas is, then, that his ethics of the other is, at root, a religious viewpoint and cannot serve as a philosophical basis for ethics. It is an unhelpful running together of philosophy and religion, a “dog’s dinner,” as Badiou expresses it.16 I think Badiou’s objection is well taken. However, I believe more serious objections to Levinas’ project are offered by Derrida and by Putnam (for whom the ethics of the other is supererogatory to an excessive degree).17 Derrida’s well-known objection to his former teacher’s philosophy, that it attempts to break free of the language of the same to speak of the other but employs the language of the same in doing so, can, I believe, be taken further in a direction which at the same time indicates the overcoming of Derrida’s own philosophy. That is, to speak of the other that is beyond being is to lapse into incoherence, since one is failing to follow through on the criteria for what talk of being could involve, criteria operative in the way we come at knowledge of what is, what exists and what does not. The more serious objection to Levinas’ project goes beyond Badiou’s protest at Levinas’ introducing a religious “vision” into philosophy. For the religious view in question is, I think, an irrational one. The critical realist position of Bernard Lonergan does, I would argue, render explicit key features of such criteria for knowing being which are

13 14 15 16 17

Ibid., pp. 50–51. Ibid., pp. 32. Ibid., pp. 18–29. Ibid., p. 23. Hilary Putnam, “Levinas and Judaism,” in Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 33–62; see Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (London and New York: Routledge, 1978).

114

Insight and Analysis

operative in our thinking and knowing of being prior to any rendering explicit of the same.18 Thus, one can argue that being, what is, what exists, is to be known through our intelligent and reasonable conscious operations in raising questions, having insights as a result of those questions, formulating those insights into hypotheses or theories as possible explanations of the data, and judging whether there is sufficient reason to affirm that those explanations are not simply possibilities but do definitely or probably correspond to the way reality, being is. To deny that being, what is, is that known through intelligence and reason and is the intelligible and the reasonable, is to involve oneself in incoherence. For one uses one’s conscious intelligent and reasonable operations to do so. And to grasp that incoherence is to acknowledge that through intelligence and reason one comes to know what can and cannot be the case (in a general way), and therefore one has evidence sufficient to affirm that being is the intelligible and reasonable. Therefore to speak of “an unintelligible being” or of “a non-reasonable being” (in the sense specified) is to talk of nothing, since being is the intelligible and reasonable as established through arguments the denial of which is incoherent and thus false. Similarly, to speak of, or claim there “is” that which is apart or “beyond” being, which is “whatever is,” is unintelligible and therefore false. The very language of “beyond being” in such cases bespeaks a “picturethinking,” presencing metaphysics, albeit we are in the realm of “spiritualized” pictures. On the critical realist view, such mistaken metaphysical paths are understandable given the fact that we at once share the knowing processes of the higher animals and have our own, specifically human way to knowledge through the use of human intelligence and reason. The difficulty of differentiating these two aspects to our consciousness helps one to see how the errors of picture-thinking or presencing metaphysics are inevitable in the philosophical tradition. Neoplatonists, including Origen, seem to have been prone to one form of “picture-thinking” in metaphysics concerning the One who is beyond being.19 But one has analogous instances in current

18 See Bernard Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, CWL, Vol. 19, Philip McShane (ed.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 274–77. 19 See Bernard Lonergan, A Second Collection (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974), pp. 239–261; in the decade before J.L. Marion began to advocate the “non-being” of God notion, Lonergan had already offered a critique of the epistemological and metaphysical problems inherent in a similar phenomenological approach taken by Leslie Dewart, see Lonergan, A Second Collection, pp. 27–32.

Badiou’s Metaphysical Basis for Ethics

115

metaphysical writing in the case of analytical philosophers like David Lewis, who holds that there are “real possible” worlds, and in an earlier phase of analytical philosophy Russell and others were preoccupied with clearing Meinong’s jungle: they were faced with the challenge of dealing with entities such as the “existent round-square.” In these historic instances one can see, I believe, the problems which arise from a lack of a cognitional and epistemological base from which to sort out and critically disambiguate such metaphysical pictures. While my immediate concern here is the coherence of Levinas’ philosophy, I have also begun to outline and argue for the basic position from which my evaluation of key themes in Badiou’s philosophy will unfold, since, as I will argue below, some of the metaphysical theses of that philosophy are faced with the same problem of coherence which we have seen in the case of Levinas’ discourses concerning being and what is apart from it. But to return to the arguments in Badiou’s book on ethics, we may now examine further the positive proposals Badiou puts forward for a viable metaethics. In chapters 4 and 5 of Ethics Badiou brings together the anthropological points he has already made and develops these further in order to outline a viable notion of the good from which the “evil” may be distinguished. We have noted above how the good is that to which human “someones” must reach up, resisting their animal devotion to self, and that the good is the unfolding of the truth-process seen in human love, scientific research and investigation, and in the commitment to change of political movements for emancipation. However, this initial account of the good for Badiou must be further refined by introducing a central element in his work: the idea of the “event.” Since for Badiou ontology is coterminous with Cantorian sets, with multiples of multiples of multiples, the “event,” as a nondeducible eruption and change from what went before is, strictly speaking, outside being or beyond being.20 The radical event is a supplement to being. In his major work L’être et l’événement (Being and Event) Badiou explains what he means by the “event” using historical examples from the French Revolution, examples such as a factory strike or some other industrial action, and also refers to the history of science and mathematics. Einstein’s relativity theories, for instance, were not “predictable” or “deducible” from the “normal” science prior to them. Badiou also turns to the phenomenon of human love and to

20 Alain Badiou, L’être et l’événement (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 20.

116

Insight and Analysis

developments in music to explain further the features of the radical event. In Ethics, he writes, Thus at the heart of the baroque style at its virtuoso saturation lay the absence [vide] (as decisive as it was unnoticed) of a genuine conception of musical architectonics. The Haydn-event occurs as a kind of musical “naming” of this absence [vide]. For what constitutes the event is nothing less than a wholly new architectonic and thematic principle, a new way of developing musical writing from the basis of a few transformable units—which was precisely what, from within the baroque style, could not be perceived (there could be no knowledge of it).21

What a radical event will turn out to be is a matter of time; there is required an interval between one event and succeeding events which will show the inner significance of the first event.22 In this gap or space there is an undecidability concerning the significance and implications of the event. In this interpretation “gap” the option of radically choosing for this or that interpretation finds its place.23 In radical politics one takes it that this course of action is to be followed given what has occurred in, say, an industrial dispute between management and workers. In this context Badiou introduces notions adopted from Pascal and his analysis of the wager of the faith option: one calculates that in this context of undecidability it is worth the effort, struggle and sacrifice to act out upon a chosen interpretation of an event. In his Ethics, therefore, the notion of fidelity to the event emerges as a fundamental theme. The individual someone, entering the subject of a group given over to some truth-process, struggles to “keep going,” to remain faithful to the interpretation the group has given to the undecidable event. Since Bernard Lonergan’s philosophy has already been introduced into our discussion of Badiou, we might note here that what Badiou identifies as an “event” shares some characteristics with what Lonergan describes as the emergence of a “higher viewpoint.” Lonergan writes, The logical analyst can leap from the positive integers to group theory, but one cannot learn mathematics in that simple fashion. On the contrary, one has to perform, over and over, the same type of transition as occurs in advancing from arithmetic to elementary algebra. At each stage of the process there exists a set of rules that govern operations which result in numbers. To each stage there corresponds a symbolic image

21 Badiou, Ethics, pp. 68–69. 22 Badiou, L’être et l’événement, 232. 23 Ibid., pp. 202, 220.

Badiou’s Metaphysical Basis for Ethics

117

of doing arithmetic, doing algebra, doing calculus. In each successive image there is the potentiality of grasping by insight a higher set of rules that will govern the operations and by them elicit the numbers or symbols of the next stage.24

Lonergan generalizes the notion of the emergence of higher viewpoints to apply this to the differentiations among the sciences. A fundamental point is that the higher viewpoint arises not from a simple logical expansion, or deductive extrapolation from the previous standpoint, but from the intelligent and reasonable operations of the subject who has insights giving rise to a new cognitive field. This analysis would not apply to all cases of what Badiou means by the “event,” but it does seem to overlap with some of his examples. For Badiou, then, an “event” is, so to speak, not any event in world history in general, or the histories of science, mathematics or the arts. Rather, a radical “event” is one which cannot be predicted from within the context in which it arises. With these elements of Badiou’s position in place, we can proceed to outline the three criteria he gives for deciding what counts as evil. Evil is defined as an absence of some of the goods or values we have seen Badiou identify. As such those who hold a privatio boni notion of evil, who hold that it is a lack of what ought to be the case, not a reality in itself, may welcome this insight in Badiou. Indeed, one might think that Lonergan’s situating of evil as a privation by comparing it with other types of surd, including surds in mathematics, might appeal to Badiou’s mathematical sensibilities.25 However, there is more to Badiou’s view than this. Evil takes three forms: The first type of evil is characterized by Badiou as “Simulacrum and terror.” True, radical “events” soon disappear, and so one needs to remain faithful to them in one’s interpretation, and in the “living out” of that interpretation. But not every novelty is an “event.” As we have seen above, an “event” is unexpected from the prior situation in which it arises. Badiou further stresses that although a genuine event arises from a particular situation, insofar as it bespeaks a truth that is universal it is addressed to all. Cases can be seen in truly emancipatory political events and movements. But in the simulacrum of an event a false movement imitates the genuine radical event. Thus the Nazi revolution in Germany took over the rhetoric of

24 Bernard Lonergan, Insight: CWL, Vol. 3, F. E. Crowe and R. Doran (eds.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), p. 42 25 See, Insight, pp. 45–46, 254–257, 689.

118

Insight and Analysis

revolutionary politics and demanded fidelity to the new political and social cause. In this case, however, we see the false “event” which leads to terror.26 Rather than being addressed to all, the Nazi revolution particularized: it made the German people, that which is a particular, into a universal and used this ideology to dominate and exclude others. The Nazi commitment to this limited “set” implies the “voiding” of all that surrounds this “set”; it involves the terrorizing and destruction of all that is not “the German nation.” Other forms of the evil as the simulacrum of the event are seen in the substitution of “brutal obscurantist preachings” for true scientific research.27 It is not that opposition and struggle are evil in themselves, as the myth of modern Western “tolerance” would have it. The truth-process will be opposed to that which attempts to impede it, opposed to obfuscating common “opinions” and the like. However, such authentic opposition does not, according to Badiou, lead to violence. He writes, For however hostile to a truth he might be, in the ethic of truths every “some-one” is always represented as capable of becoming the Immortal that he is. So we may fight against the judgments and opinions he exchanges with others for the purpose of corrupting every fidelity, but not against his person—which, under the circumstances, is insignificant, and to which, in any case, every truth is ultimately addressed.28

We have seen that the animal character of the individual someone inclines the person to self-interest at the expense of a transcendence which would embrace the immortal truth. The ethical imperative “keep going” means that one has to struggle against such inertia which resists fidelity to the truthprocess. The second form which evil can take is, therefore, betrayal. One is tempted to betray authentic commitment to the truth-process as this is manifest in science, art, politics, or human love.29 The third way in which evil comes about as a failure to realize a good has to do, Badiou contends, with attempting to name the “unnameable.” This involves the error of thinking that one has achieved completeness or totality in some area of life, in politics, science, or human love. Such totalizing is seen in the way Nazism, and other false political creeds, attempt to name and identify the “whole” of the political community, and thus delimit it at

26 27 28 29

Cf. Badiou, Ethics, pp. 72–74. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., p. 76. Cf. Ibid., pp. 78–80.

Badiou’s Metaphysical Basis for Ethics

119

the cost of the outsider. The language in a given area of discourse does not have the power to name all truths, all elements in its domain. The attempt to achieve this illusory result of “completeness” issues in disaster, as the violence of totalitarian regimes testifies.30

III The outline of Badiou’s Ethics given above has not attempted to cover every detail of his argument, but I hope that I have provided an account which does capture some of its key features. The outline has also touched upon aspects of the wider picture of Badiou’s philosophy, especially as these enter into his arguments on ethics. As we have seen, the ethical position is tied inextricably to Badiou’s work in ontology. In this section I will go on to evaluate critically some of the themes of the Ethics and in the section to follow I will discuss some of the wider metaphysical and epistemological questions which arise for Badiou’s philosophy. Certainly one does not have to belong to the Maoist-Marxist tradition in philosophy to appreciate a number of Badiou’s critical canards against the current ethical confusions of Western society. As we have seen, Badiou seems to admit in his preface to Ethics that there may be rhetorical exaggeration at work in some of his criticism of current ethical views, and in reading the work one has the impression that his evaluations on occasion generate more heat than light. For instance, Badiou offers, what I believe to be, a justified and significant criticism of the ethics of euthanasia, on the basis that it employs a notion of human dignity in a way that at once signifies that the weak and infirm have no dignity.31 But then to go on to attack the whole enterprise of bioethics, and of ethics committees, as in some way continuous with Nazi eugenics is quite beyond the pale. Attempts to reach just and fair decisions about the allocation of health resources may be stymied by false philosophies or by the evil of social bias, but to proclaim that the absence of all such attempts is the answer is to encourage injustice and hubris to the detriment of everyone. Those who think perspectives from premodern philosophies of the common good such as those of Aristotle and Aquinas are still important for social, political, and economic ethics will also find that a number of the criticisms Badiou offers of current consumerist, laissez-faire capitalism in the

30 Cf. Ibid., pp. 80–86. 31 Ibid., pp. 35–36.

120

Insight and Analysis

Western world are to the point. His ironic remarks concerning the inconsistencies of relativistic theories of toleration are also, I believe, well taken. One can agree with much of this criticism even if one has reservations about the socioeconomic analyses of a Maoist-Marxist stripe which Badiou subsumes into his philosophy but does not argue for in Ethics, and which clearly provide the context for his notion of the “emancipatory” in politics. While sharing the view that the economic and political structures of society must be emancipatory, Lonergan expresses grave doubts about the scientific cogency of Marxist analysis in his work on economic analysis. He writes, . . . Marx had a sound and, it would seem, original intuition into the nature of capitalist profit; it is this intuition that gives Marxian thought its fascination and power. It remains that Marx expressed his intuition confusedly and emotionally in terms of surplus value and exploitation. But its accurate expression is in macroeconomic terms, and it is on the basis of such accurate expression and in the context of Christian praxis that a solution is to be sought.32

However, if we focus on the three forms of evil Badiou delineates, I think the problematic nature of Badiou’s metaethical enterprise becomes evident. As was noted above, one example Badiou provides of the first type of evil, that of the simulacrum, has to do with the “preaching” which can pass itself off as real scientific work and communication. Thomas Kuhn has taught us a good deal about the obtuseness, bias and human folly which are operative in the scientific community, just as they are in every form of human community. Nevertheless, such analyses in fact presuppose that what we take to be genuine in scientific research are virtues cultivated both by individual scientists and the research community at large which foster attentiveness to data and evidence, intelligent inquiry concerning that data, reasonableness in evaluating the truth of hypotheses and theories, and responsibility in communicating in an appropriate way such research. If Badiou means by “preaching,” then, some rhetorical substitute for these epistemic virtues of community and individual research we can agree with him that such “preaching” is indeed a false and inauthentic flight from proper scientific activity.

32 Lonergan, “Questionnaire on Philosophy: Response,” Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980: CWL, Vol. 17, Robert Croken and Robert M. Doran (eds.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 369–370; see also, Bernard Lonergan, For a New Political Economy: CWL, Vol. 15, Philip McShane (ed.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998); Bernard Lonergan, Macroeconomic Dynamics: An Essay in Circulation Analysis: CWL, Vol. 21, F. G. Lawrence, P. H. Byrne and C. Hefling, Jr. (eds.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).

Badiou’s Metaphysical Basis for Ethics

121

However, this is not the principal notion involved in Badiou’s first category of evil and it is not clear how this legitimate example of inauthenticity is related to the evil of the simulacrum as the error of taking a mere “novelty” for a true “event”; the “event” being that which arises in an unpredictable fashion from the prior situation such that it names or identifies the prior “void” or absence of itself. Problems arise for this principal notion of the evil simulacrum. Thus, one can readily imagine some musicologist or composer who strongly believes that the work of some significant composer, or perhaps of the composer himself, is not only significant but is of the “event” type. That is, it is similar in its “newness” to the emergence of the classical style, as Badiou describes this. Similarly, one could also think of a scientist or of an historian of science who takes some incremental advance, which no one doubts is significant, to be an “event” similar to that of Einstein’s contributions. Other musicologists and composers and other historians of science and scientists may disagree, while acknowledging that in these instances progress has been made. Now it seems an exaggerated and wholly unjustified claim to assert that those who hold, mistakenly perhaps, that the scientific and aesthetic advances in question are also “events” are therefore not only mistaken but hold “evil” views. Further, if all we have to go on is what Badiou gives us in his arguments, then we would be forced to say that such mistakes, about the status of some scientific or musical development, are equivalent in evil to the Nazi doctrines of the Übermensch, Lebensraum and the acceptability of genocide in given circumstances. In the case of Badiou’s second form of evil we have already alluded above to the fact that Badiou himself has identified problems in his account.33 Such willingness to develop and change his philosophical views is certainly a characteristic of Badiou’s writing that one must praise. However, I do not think Badiou’s retraction of his earlier views goes far enough in seeing that the retraction itself reveals presuppositions which are at odds with the overall project of the Ethics. The second category of evil is, as we have seen, the failure to remain faithful to the truth-process or to “keep going” in one’s commitment to action consequent upon one’s interpretation of an “event.” In his retraction Badiou acknowledges that his earlier thoughts had failed to take account, in a thorough enough fashion, of the fact that persons can be committed to evil causes: the SS guard can go down fighting still loyal to the last to the Führer. We can see how Badiou’s criticism of his earlier view is quite justified. But the further problem which arises for his work from this admission is, I believe, that it makes explicit something which is

33 See Ethics, pp. lvi–lviii.

122

Insight and Analysis

there implicitly throughout the whole project. That is, in his self-criticism Badiou is demonstrating that he already presumes a view of “evil” and “good” or certain actions as “evil,” and in this instance he has judged his own account wanting when measuring it against such prior convictions which he takes his readers to share. But then the project of the book is supposedly to determine what are evil or good acts, and he takes other views to task for failing to do this, or for presupposing metaethical judgments which they do not themselves validate. Such presumptions are operative throughout his work as he tries to show us how his categories fit with what we already assume, or he takes it we will already assume, to be cases of good and evil. So in the case of the first category of evil, the simulacrum, examples are drawn from the evils of totalitarian regimes, already taken to be evil, and then Badiou’s phenomenology attempts to accommodate itself to these prior commitments. This “accommodation” is acknowledged to have been unsuccessful by Badiou himself in the case of the second category, that of “betrayal” “failure in fidelity,” and we have seen how it is quite unconvincingly attempted in the case of the first category of simulacrum. If we turn now to the third category of “naming the unnameable” we shall also, I believe, see that this is so. As we have seen above, the third category of evil involves the evil of reaching for “totality” or “completeness.” In the truth-process one cannot achieve this end. Gödel’s incompleteness arguments regarding second-order logic are introduced to illustrate how such “completeness” is illusory for truth-processes.34 The evil of attempting to realize and name the unnameable is seen in the way political regimes attempt to identify a community, the Nazi identification of the Volk for instance, and thus exclude and oppress others. However, “completeness” in fact is what we aim at in any cognitional procedure. It is therefore intrinsic to any truth-process, and if that truthprocess be taken as a good, which I think it should be, then “completeness” is a good aimed at in rational argument and inquiry, and the aspiration to completeness is good and not evil. Any judgment, be it probable or definite is an answer to a question which aims at completeness in the relevant domain, and individual judgments enter into explanations and theories which similarly aim at completeness relevant to the questions in hand. A judgment or a theory is taken to be correct or well established because it answers all the relevant questions, meets all the relevant objections. These “alls” are the completeness sought for and found. Gödel’s very arguments proving the incompleteness of second-order logic are no exception. Arguments to show

34 Ethics, p. 86.

Badiou’s Metaphysical Basis for Ethics

123

that something cannot be done are successful insofar as they attain to the completeness involved in justifying a definitive or a probable judgment. If any of Badiou’s own arguments succeed they do so by achieving such “completeness.” It may be that philosophical systems such as those of Nietzsche or Hegel have something of hubris about them in their attempts to be “allencompassing.” But one needs much more than Badiou provides by way of argument and analysis to justify or explain such a critique. Yes, one can think of cultural images like the “mad scientist” playing God, but if these are not to be rhetorical images that run out of control, justifying the assault on the castles of philosophy and of science by the obscurantist horde carrying pitchforks, one needs far more clarification and justification than is offered in Badiou’s ethics. I think that the endeavors of some cosmologists to develop Theories of Everything (TOE) in science are utterly flawed from the viewpoints of epistemology, philosophy of science and metaphysics. However, while it may be the case that some who try to develop and defend TOEs in cosmology have suspect motives it may well be that they do not. The attempt to elaborate TOEs is simply wrong—it is not evil. As it stands Badiou’s claim that “completeness” or the aspiration to “completeness” in any domain, including human love, mathematics, science, and politics is evil is not only unjustified but appears bizarre to the point of comedy. Are we to suppose that the philosopher from his meta-viewpoint must decide and choose just where and when a scientific theory or explanatory account has gone too far in pushing forward toward the forbidden fruit of completeness, so that a fiery angel can be dispatched to guard the gate to “completeness” with sword in hand? Or can one imagine Hitler ordering secret work, not only for the development of a Nazi atom bomb, but for an improved Nazi version of Principia Mathematica showing that Gödel was wrong to deny proof of the completeness of second-order logic?! That the naming or identification of a group or community is itself evil is hardly credible, and that such identification constitutes the evil of the crimes of Nazism or Stalinism is even less credible. Again one sees that regimes and historical events have been chosen which we are all expected to acknowledge as having been massively evil and then there is an attempt to accommodate the phenomenology to our prior assumptions. But to name and identify a community may be essential to serving the needs of that community. Does not Badiou himself identify such communities as “factory workers” in the process of describing what he takes to be ethically good and politically emancipatory activity? Might not one need to identify and distinguish groups such as, for example, factory workers as distinct from

124

Insight and Analysis

farmers, and those in the fishing industry as distinct from politically active philosophy professors in order to meet the distinctive requirements of these groups and coordinate their activity? The identification of the “community” of all or any “someones,” those with the capability of becoming the “immortal,” is a type of naming, a form of general reference, that is central to Badiou’s Ethics itself.35 Evil actions do arise from erroneous beliefs in many cases of what we call “evil.” However, the Nazi beliefs were not erroneous, and thus led to evil actions, because those beliefs were “complete,” or aspired to completeness but because they were wrong due to other errors. Indeed, since error often occurs because of a lack of sufficient understanding, it can be argued that some erroneous beliefs about, say, what human beings are, which lead to evil actions are erroneous because of an absence of completeness. Jason Barker’s exposition and defense of Badiou’s third category of evil is equally unconvincing.36 Barker attempts to illustrate the evil of “totalizing” by pointing to the fact that Hitler’s atheism (a view Barker clearly takes to be correct and good) led to the kind of evil Badiou is thinking of, because of Hitler’s “passionate” commitment to it. Now I happen to think that atheism is not defensible philosophically, and I also think there are good ethical and cultural/philosophical arguments one can offer in support of the position that the atheism of Nazism was not a benign error, but was intrinsic to the dangerous creed of this post-Enlightenment political vision. But it is not my concern to deploy such arguments here. Rather, accepting, for the sake of argument, that Hitler’s ideas in this regard were correct and good one can question the cogency of the notion that it is the passionate commitment to correct ideas that of itself leads to “totalizing terror.” I have no doubt that a vital part of human moral development is the integration of emotions and correct moral beliefs. However, “passionate commitment” in and of itself is not a bad thing and does not necessarily lead to the oversight of other goods which one should foster or protect, while of course it can do so. We are not, I take it, to consider Badiou’s own “passionate commitment” over many years to the cause of the socially oppressed an evil, nor is “keep going”

35 Notice the manner in which Paul Hallward makes explicit this “indifferently addressed” invitation of the book to “all someones” in his Introduction, see Ethics, p. xxxvi. 36 Jason Barker, Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 139–140. Badiou is much exercised over the Russellian paradox of self-reference in set-theory. Among the analyses which serve to demystify philosophical confusions arising from Russell’s problem one can recommend, Richard L. Cartwright (1994), “Speaking of Everything,” Noûs, XXIII: 1, 1–20.

Badiou’s Metaphysical Basis for Ethics

125

unconnected with passionate commitment. Passionate commitment can lead one to overlook other goods, other duties, but so can apathy and indifference. It is the inconsistent pursuit of the good, unreasonably preferring one instance to another, that is at the root of evil, not “passions” as such (although one does have a responsibility to educate one’s passions so that they do not tend to draw one into inconsistent pursuit of goods—no easy task that!). It is not the case then that Badiou’s criteria for evil are shown to be so if and when they are applied to the domain of politics. The criteria are laid out and argued for in a way that gives no hint of any further ingredient that makes the aspiration to totality or completeness in political systems evil, whereas it is not in science or mathematics. Again one feels that the real work for grounding the claim that a given political system is evil is being done elsewhere—insights of moral evaluation are being insinuated and not argued for. I think, then, that while the mordent criticisms offered by Badiou of rival contemporary approaches to ethics invite comparison with those offered in their own day by Voltaire and Nietzsche, and while the lively and even entertaining nature of the writing of these three philosophers on ethics is worth highlighting, one would have to say that for the Nietzschean Badiou too often shows, both implicitly and explicitly, his hand: the agenda behind his ethics and attacks on contemporary views which remains itself unjustified. For the Nietzschean Badiou’s cavils against others, therefore, would simply be a mask for his own Marxist-Maoist political ethics which, for Nietzsche, would be but the degraded remnant of the Judaeo-Christian heritage, itself born of the self-interested ressentiment of the dispossessed for the powerful. As we turn to examine some of the problems which arise for the metaphysical themes underlying Badiou’s ethics in the following sections, I believe we will see further instances of Badiou’s tendency to accommodate his phenomenology to judgments and evaluations already presumed but in no way justified or argued for by the phenomenology itself. As in the case of what we take, and what Badiou assumes we will take, to have been evils in recent history, so in the areas of aesthetic development and scientific development Badiou’s philosophy fails to provide reasons for thinking that such and such was an advance. Rather it attempts to give plausibility to its analyses by selecting instances in the history of science or the arts which are already generally reckoned to have been cases of progress. Because it is an “antiepistemological” or “aepistemological” philosophy it cannot really distinguish what would count as advance and what stasis or decline. Apart from other problems, this means that Badiou’s thought, as applied to ethics, science, and the arts is an accommodation to a status quo: it is anything but a radical challenge to what is accepted prior to it.

126

Insight and Analysis

IV Some forms of reductionism postulate a lower stratum, that of physics, say, as the “really real” such that any putative “higher entities,” those treated of by chemistry, biology, zoology, psychology, the social sciences, and so forth, are mere epiphenomena—fictive illusions. But, in terms of the probable verification of hypotheses that goes on in the sciences there is no more reason to privilege the entity named a photon then there is the entity known as an elephant – doing so is arbitrary and therefore irrational. Other, more ambitious forms of reductionism in the philosophical tradition have taken other routes. Such routes have been followed in the name of some “picturethinking” metaphysical urge that believes the really real must be little bits inside bigger bits that we can see. Now where to stop this reduction, as one descends on the elevator of one’s imagination, has always been a problem. But one seems to have to stop somewhere, be it at space-time points, the “atoms” of the metaphysician, or at monads. These postulated smaller entities are often found to have problems of one kind or another associated with their conceptual elaboration. But the more fundamental problem is their being postulated without any warrant or without sufficient warrant. However, Badiou’s real world of pure mathematical constructs suffers from deeper difficulties than the aforementioned. In the mathematical exercise of subdividing or differentiating the continuum into multiples or multiples of multiples, etc. to pause at any point is, from the mathematical viewpoint, merely arbitrary. There is no way of privileging one stage of subdivisions as opposed to another. But in that case how does one safeguard the structural entities, unities and differentiae of the theories of physics, chemistry, biology, zoology, etc? Despite this problem arising ineluctably from his approach Badiou believes that the scientific theories of physics are true of the real world we inhabit.37 Such science, as he argues, speaks the language of mathematics. But it would appear that rather like Hume, who in wishing to imitate in philosophy the explanatory power of Newton’s physics ended up by undermining all such physics, Badiou’s philosophy pulls the rug from any attempt to establish that physics or any other science provides probable accounts of the constituents of the reality of our world. The mathematics of set-theory is applicable to any possible world in which there is deemed to be an empirical continuum. But the skeptic can therefore ask, how does one know that in knowing, or understanding Cantorean set-theory one knows that there is any real world at all? And the skeptical probe in this instance is

37 See Ethics, p. 128.

Badiou’s Metaphysical Basis for Ethics

127

far from otiose, since it stimulates us to ask just how one can provide cognitional and epistemological criteria to show what constitutes knowledge of the real world, of actual being, rather than, or beyond what one can understand in the case of “merely” mathematical or logical truths or judgments. At this point it might be suggested that it is precisely in this context that we need to pay attention to Badiou’s work on establishing ontological commitment vis-à-vis mathematical entities. He is preoccupied with, for instance, debates between different positions in the foundations of mathematics and metaphysics of mathematics. Cantor had one view of the nature of mathematical objects, but there are many opposing views on the matter. However, before we go on to look at Badiou’s invocation of Pascal’s wager in his attempt to bridge epistemic gaps in these arguments, we need to note additional problems. Whatever mathematical entities turn out to be, even if they are platonic beings, that ontological thesis alone does not suffice to explain or ground a metaphysical position on reductionism. If there are platonic mathematical entities, how do they enter into the composition of things as understood in physics, biology, chemistry, and so forth? The “causal” structures identified in these fields of investigation in judgments (with greater or lesser degrees of probability) are not determined in their intelligible ordering simply in terms of mathematics: mathematics is applied in a crucial way to the understanding of those structures and their interrelationships but, contrary to some extreme version of the seventeenth-century rationalist vision of the more geometrico, mathematics alone does not give us the explanations of the data. Nor does the truth of mathematical judgments depend upon their applicability to the sciences of this, actual world. Such application is a matter of further judgment regarding the issues at hand. And while the development of the sciences and mathematics have gone hand in hand in terms of mutual stimulation, this should be no restraint on the freedom of the creativity of the mathematician to explore possibilities perhaps never to be realized in the actual world. Badiou’s oversight is to have run together, or failed to have noticed the difference between the “one” as an element in a mathematical intelligible ordering, a set, and, on the other hand, “one” as the identity, “all that is involved in understanding,” the “what” or nature of an entity. The “one” in the mathematical case is necessarily “unstable” in the way it is not in the second case. For whatever aspect of the continuum we take to be an instance of “unity” can just as well be taken as the occasion of insights which grasp the intelligible ratios of fractional subdivision. But the “one” in the sense of the “what” of an entity is not so indifferent to “arbitrary” differentiation in this fashion. The “one” that is, for instance, the intelligible unity that is a

128

Insight and Analysis

dog or a horse, as these are understood in part by commonsense knowing and further through scientific knowing, entails that a part of this entity, the foot, or the heart or the lung has an intelligible relation to the whole such that its subtraction or removal has an effect on both part and whole which is quite different from mere mathematical subtraction. Jason Barker attempts to expound and defend Badiou’s notions concerning a mathematical world of multiples of multiples, in which the “one” is deconstructed, using the example of the Eiffel Tower.38 Barker argues that we might think the Eiffel Tower is a unified “one.” But in fact this notion of a “unified thing” breaks down when we think of the multiples of cultural and socioeconomic relations into which the object, the Eiffel Tower, enters. The Tower is at once something that is in books, films, and plays and in the minds of tourists: its putative “oneness” breaks down, then, into such multiplicities. However, I think this example is neither convincing in itself nor does it demonstrate a grasp of the full implications of Badiou’s position, implications which are better spelled out in a skeptical unravelling of the possibility of any realist metaphysics on the basis of his thought. To begin with, we are perfectly justified both in commonsense and scientific terms in judging that if the Eiffel Tower were, say, dismantled next month due to the discovery of structural instability “it,” the unity of the Eiffel Tower would no longer exist, despite the fact that it “lives” on in the cultural imaginations of the world, in books, plays, and the like. Identifying certain human artefacts as unities analogous to the unities which are horses or electrons is not always an easy matter, and requires careful analysis in each case. But I would say we have ample evidence to claim that the Eiffel Tower is a unity, has a formal cause or intelligible structure such that it is an architectural and engineering intelligible “one,” in the same way as we can justifiably claim that a cigarette lighter is one or a car is one. Indeed, playing fast and loose with such identifications of unity in the name of cultural or aesthetic interrelations does little to throw light on such relations which, I believe, deserve careful ontological analysis.39 If we opt for an indeterminism of the object to such an extent that we have no hold whatsoever on the determinate meaning of the “it” in the judgment “it exists,” then such judgments referring to reality are themselves impossible: impossible for commonsense knowledge and impossible for scientific knowledge.

38 Barker, pp. 45–46; for Badiou’s discussion of the “dissolution of the one,” and his account of “consistent” and “inconsistent” presentation see, L’être et l’événement, 33. 39 Cf. Beards, Method in Metaphysics, chapter 10.

Badiou’s Metaphysical Basis for Ethics

129

In these judgments the “it” in question may refer to the type of unity that common sense and current science take to be evident in the case of dogs, horses, or electrons. But it may also refer to the parts of those unities, intrinsically related to the whole in terms of structural intelligibility, to the acts which those individuals perform, to events, to states of affairs, to regularities or to whole world-orders of interrelated individuals and states of affairs. One tries to do away with the metaphysical notion of “one” in these senses (as distinct from the set related mathematical notion of “one”) at one’s ontological peril. For any judgment about reality can be analyzed in terms of such a positing of identity, such identity can be further analyzed as implying that A is, B is, C is, A is neither C nor B, and so on. A may be a unity like a horse, or a given action of that animal, or a statistical regularity referring to a state of affairs or whatever. But “oneness,” in the sense of differentiated identity is intrinsic to all such affirmations pertaining to reality. However, as pointed out above, mathematics since it is indifferent to and prescinds from any intelligible differentiations in the empirical continuum of the kind we have been discussing in this paragraph provides no determination of the “it” referred to in judgments pertaining to such realities. In short, we not only lose the identity of the Eiffel Tower, but that of the books, the films, the poems in which it features. We lose the possibility of affirming the realities of the persons, the “someones” who talk about it. And the possibility of Barker’s own argument for Badiou’s case is itself nullified. It should be understood that any notion of “delusion” or “illusion” is out of the question in this context. Mathematical seriations of themselves have no causal powers such as to bring about “mirages” of apparently real persons, or other things. In scenarios such as the brain in the vat, or the more recent versions of this thought experiment in films such as The Matrix what is posited are real persons being deluded and real equipment bringing about the delusions and, the reality of the delusions (it is really the case that such and such is a “delusion”). But set-theoretic differentiations have no causal capacity to produce either the reality of the deluded brain or the reality of the deluding equipment. The skeptical unravelling of an ontology does not stop there. For as we have argued above, the skeptical question is, how do we know Badiou’s mathematical universe is real at all? How do we know it is not just a possible world? Badiou’s own inattention to or inadequate elaboration of cognitional and epistemology criteria emerge once more as the crucial methodological problem for his philosophy. Now if we argue that the way to verify the mathematical as pertaining to the real world is, then, in terms of the kind of procedures through which we learn about number as children, that is a start in the right direction. We have

130

Insight and Analysis

insights into the empirical continuum and we make judgments on the basis of these insights to do with counting, such that this is “one” as related to and differentiated from a “second” and so forth. Similarly, we learn about fractions from insights and judgments of the kind which refer to the dividing up of, say, a cake. Mathematics as a science goes on to extrapolate far beyond what can be verified in these concrete instances. Such extrapolation is taken to be legitimate and intrinsic to the intelligible elaboration of mathematics and its various departments. But, of course, it is the area in which questions to do with “surveyability” arise: be these with regard to such items as the parallel postulate and the uniqueness of Euclidean Geometry or concerning the decidability of such positions as that of Cantor on transfinite numbers, troubled as it is by, among other issues, the nonprovability of the continuum hypothesis. But the point at issue in the present context is simply that if it is in such “learning” cases that we see paradigm examples of the verification of the connection between mathematics and the real, as distinct from a possible world, then it should be at once added that if we can verify such a “connection” in given instances of the continuum, the empirical continuum no less provides evidence for the ontological identity and distinctiveness of individuals such as biscuits, marbles, and the like which we begin our counting and dividing from. We never encounter the empirical continuum in either its physical instantiation or in our imaginary constructs (based themselves upon our experience of spatio-temporally organized data) as bare data: it is always “informed” in some fashion. Thus the data provide reasonable evidence for both kinds of differentiation, mathematical and ontological, of things and of states at once. To undermine the verification of the latter in the name of the former would be without warrant, and if one is to undertake such an enterprise the undermining could not be simply in “mathematical terms” alone, but on the basis of further philosophical arguments not simply mathematical in nature. Badiou’s philosophy can, in fact, be described as antiepistemological. As Jason Barker writes, For Badiou there is nothing outside thought, and questions of objective knowledge and/or existence must be posed solely in terms of what is and what is not thinkable—accepting the aphorism of Parmenides that thought and being are identical—for the subject.40

40 Barker, p. 9.

Badiou’s Metaphysical Basis for Ethics

131

If this adequately summarizes Badiou’s anti-realist ontology then problems for the view readily manifest themselves. To begin with claims in Badiou’s writing about social phenomena, factory workers, French politics, Nazi crimes, Heidegger’s ontology, Einstein’s discoveries, and so forth do not seem to be truth claims, judgments about other possible worlds, or about mere objects of thought. They are claims about the actual world and its ontology. But deeper problems emerge for this position. Do the propositions (a) “there is nothing outside thought” and (b) “thought and being are identical” have the same status in Badiou’s oeuvre as, say, the proposition, “the Easter bunny drinks only Bourbon?” Clearly, they do not and we do not interest ourselves in Badiou’s work as a work of fiction. Rather propositions (a) and (b) are not put forward by Barker or Badiou as mere objects of thought, possibilities entertained, but as judgments claiming what truly is the case. Now since these judgments are put forward in this way they provide a counterexample to the philosophical position being put forward: that being, reality, is known simply by being thought. Rather, as the case of the judgments in question shows, being, reality, “what is,” is known not just through thinking (in the sense of entertaining and excogitating possibilities) but through judgments of fact regarding, in these cases, reality or being. In fact it would be impossible for a defender of Badiou’s to deny what I have claimed here. Because denying what I have claimed, judging that it is not so, would not simply be a matter of thinking about what I have said as a possibility, but would involve a judgment (probable or certain) that what I claim is not so. Below we shall look at the role Pascal’s wager plays in Badiou’s epistemological attempt to justify his various philosophical options, but what I wish to stress at this point is that, while the metaphysical nature of mathematical objects may be in question (albeit I have already given some suggestions regarding ways in which such issues may be tackled) the ontological status of the “things-unities,” actions, events, relationships, and aggregates reasonably affirmed as existing or being in common sense, scientific and other kinds of knowing, including, as we shall shortly see philosophical knowing, are not in question in the same fashion. We have the evidence of the myriad probable affirmations of the physical and social sciences and other cognitive disciplines, and, in addition, those of commonsense knowing to support the position that we know real individuals, structures and so forth. Furthermore there are philosophical arguments to the effect that in the case of our own intelligent and reasonable conscious operations, such as questions, insights, and judgments (and other activities bound up with them), and the conscious unity that obtains between these activities, we have evidence of an ontological unity of diverse cognitional activities. Indeed, in

132

Insight and Analysis

this paradigm ontological instance it is the case that to deny or argue against the said conscious unity and its various intelligent and reasonable conscious activities is to involve oneself in incoherent self-refutation. For the very activity of argument, of denial, of counterfactual supposition or whatever are immediate evidence for the truth of the claims concerning this conscious unity and its acts, and refutation as counter-to-fact of its denial. One cannot judge coherently that one does not judge, and this is the case with regard to the other elements of conscious cognitional structure and their conscious unity in the one subject who is aware both of attention to the data of experience, and of questioning and of judgment, and, at the same time, of the interrelation between these activities (one is conscious of the grasp of sufficient evidence from which a judgment “yes” or “no” arises). Not all our judgments about reality attain to this degree of definitiveness, since to deny some scientific hypothesis purporting to explain given data does not land one in contradiction as does the denial of conscious cognitional structure. For the denial of the latter provides incontrovertible evidence for the reality, being of these activities in the very conscious activities involved in the denial. However, the paradigm instance also is a validation of the more general criteria of knowing the truth of reality or being in terms of intelligible grasp and reasonable affirmation of a prospective judgment. In other cases, then, as in science, one may have grounds to say that such and such a concept or hypothesis is probably true of reality (with a greater or lesser degree of probability attached). The paradigm instance of the self-affirmation of the conscious unity, self-assembling unity, among the conscious activities of attention to data, intelligent inquiry into data and reasonable judgment as regards the truth of one’s theories or hypotheses, also provides criteria for distinguishing (in an initial cognitional manner) between truth judgments pertaining to logic and mathematics, on the one hand, and judgments referring to reality, being, what exists, on the other. For in the case of the latter judgments, seen in scientific, commonsense and other knowing, and acknowledged under pain of self-referential inconsistency to be so in self-affirmation, one can specify that the fulfillment of the conditions in which the sufficiency of evidence is grasped is had in the data of sense or of consciousness. That is, in the data of sensate experience and also in the data which are the conscious activities themselves. Further these judgments are answers relative to questions which ask about the being, reality, existence of the item identified in intelligent acts of understanding. As noted above, while our initial understanding of and judgments about number begin in the empirical data, mathematics goes on to extrapolations the truth of which is judged by grasping fulfillment of conditions in terms of the intelligible decision procedures involved. Such

Badiou’s Metaphysical Basis for Ethics

133

judgments are agnostic as to the real existence of most of the propositions judged to be true. When we are not sure that we have intelligible decision procedures for such mathematical judgments then questions can be raised about the cogency of any determinate judgment in this or that case, as we see in debates inspired by intuitionist, constructivist, and finitist mathematical viewpoints.

V If we turn now to the role Pascal’s wager plays in Badiou’s philosophy we will see that the absence of the kind of cognitional and epistemological underpinnings argued for above has the consequence that Badiou’s philosophy is powerless to counter the kind of skeptical challenges which have been very evident in the last few decades in the philosophy of science regarding fallibilism, and the challenge to the idea that there is anything like Platonic truth or that we can know that there is such. A renewed interest in an epistemological analysis of Pascal’s wager is certainly to be welcomed, especially in the context of current philosophical discussions concerning virtue epistemology. When we tease apart some of the elements in Pascal’s wager I think we can see that it involves both a reliance on probable judgments of facts and values, and a risk analysis that aims at showing a certain practical course of action is worthwhile, is of value, as an end to be pursued. In addition, one of the values intrinsic to the process as Pascal presents it is that of believing the testimony of another as a way to truth. Such a value can be defended as such when we consider the role that believing others plays in social existence. Most of the things I say “I know” (in a somewhat loose epistemic sense of “know”) I in fact believe on the testimony of another or others. As I grow and develop in various areas of “relative expertise” myself I increase my capacity to discern whether or not it is reasonable to believe, trust, this or that group of persons: I begin to distinguish between doctors and quacks. Believing in the testimony of others as a value is an aspect of Pascal’s argument, since what is in question is whether one of his agnostic interlocutors should trust the word of the Christian religion concerning the afterlife. Thus, one is invited to trust the testimony of another or others concerning things one has not directly verified or witnessed oneself. In the case of the wager one is invited to do this in terms of a risk analysis: if one trusts these witnesses one may gain eternal life, if one does not, still the enterprise of being a good person will not have been a waste of time. One should add, however, that being a “good person” according to Pascal’s

134

Insight and Analysis

Catholic view would involve various acts of self-denial, and the controlling of one’s passions in this or that area of life. So there would be some element of “loss,” as “loss” might be described from other philosophical or religious viewpoints. However, one should also understand that intrinsic to the wager are probable judgments of truth and value. It may seem odd to many, but there are those who need convincing that “eternal life” is itself a value—one might need to pursue clarification of what one meant by this, and arguments in which one attempts to show that the person in question does really “want” this. In addition there are a number of probable factual judgments involved. We can take it that Pascal’s interlocutors in their context thought that there was some evidence for the claims of Christianity being true. Something like Pascal’s wager would completely fail in a case in which we thought the proposed course of action was based on factual claims that were impossible or utterly improbable, or even probable with a low degree of probability when weighed against the negative risks of the suggested enterprise. If someone came up to me and said that 5 minutes earlier they had just had a revelation in which they came to know that if I turned around three times after lunch every Tuesday for the rest of my life I would inherit eternal life or win the lottery in old age, I would hardly be convinced. My lack of conviction might be compounded by the evidence of seeing a psychiatric nurse escort the person away for his evening tea shortly after our encounter. We can see what is going on in Pascal’s wager when applied to a nonreligious context in the following example: a zoologist decides to trust the word of a good friend of many year’s standing who claims that he (and he alone) has seen, in a clear and definite way, instances of a most rare and hitherto unknown unusual mammal in the Amazon jungle. The zoologist decides to undertake an expensive expedition to track down the animal on the strength of his friend’s witness. The risks involve financial loss and embarrassment before critics, but the possible gains are taken to far outweigh these negative possible outcomes. Badiou’s use of Pascal’s wager occurs in epistemic contexts in which Badiou wishes to justify our deciding for the interpretation of a given event, such interpretation then entering into our political course of action taken as flowing from that event.41 In an analogous way it is also used to “decide for” Cantor’s interpretation of mathematical objects, as opposed to the

41 On the role Pascal’s wager plays in Badiou’s account of our choice of how we will interpret the significance of an “event” for a subsequent course of action, see L’être et l’événement, 229–231.

Badiou’s Metaphysical Basis for Ethics

135

interpretation of his opponents, and is seen as applying to our decisions for key successful theories in science.42 Now I have no doubt that reflection upon Pascal’s wager can be of assistance in thinking about the epistemological and evaluative criteria operative in mathematics, science, and other cognitive domains. However, there are also disanalogies which Badiou does not seem to take into account and, further, the implicit fallibilism which emerges from applying the wager in a modified form to human cognitive disciplines has its own problems which Badiou’s philosophy does nothing to address. To begin with, the scientific community or community of mathematicians do not “trust” the word of a major figure, such as Cantor or Brouwer, in the way such trust occurs in our example of the zoologist and his colleague who risk mounting an expedition to the Amazon. Rather various mathematicians and philosophers of mathematics will provide arguments, reasons, for why this or that element in Cantor’s thought, say, appears well founded, while other elements appear unconvincing, to finitists for instance, or are, as least, a matter of rational dispute. Thus the value choice of belief in another’s account does not enter into such cognitive enterprises in the same way, nor is a blind, irrational leap of faith in the word of the “great scientist,” without any given reasons, the way science develops in the long run. If and when acts of deference to the “great” do skew the communal process of rational investigation of the data (as we know from history occurs) this is surely a case of the inauthentic simulacrum of scientific practice which Badiou rightly castigates in his Ethics. A perhaps understandable cultural bias has led various philosophers during the last two centuries to think that if one simply opts in one’s philosophy for probable judgments as to what is really so, and denies claims to certainty and definite judgments, one will avoid criticism of one’s modest and humble philosophical proposals. But, as any deconstructionist worth her salt knows, and as the attacks launched by instrumentalists and others on Karl Popper’s scientific fallibilism in the 1960s and 1970s testify, the claim to reach probable judgments about reality is just as philosophically ambitious in its own way as is the claim to attain some certain, definitive judgments about the real. Popper’s rhetorical defense of his notion that probable judgments approximate to truth was unconvincing, since opponents could object that if one never reached this chimera of “truth” in science, one could never know there was such a thing or that one was oriented toward it.43

42 See Barker, pp. 57–58. 43 On the problems of fallibilism and their resolution see, Hugo A. Meynell, Redirecting Philosophy, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), chapter 7.

136

Insight and Analysis

To defend the philosophical probity of the notion of probable judgments about reality (meaning by “probable” here “some evidence is in for judgment x,” so that judgments as to frequency probabilities are a subset of this larger domain) one needs to argue for our ability to know with certainty the truth about reality in some instances, and thereby clarify how probable judgments meet some of the requirements for definite judgments but not all of them. Thus the judgments about our own cognitional operations, which cannot be coherently denied because the conscious activities of denying them provide sufficient evidence that they are so, provide such a standard of definite judgments of truth about reality, in contrast to which the notion of probable judgments about reality can be clarified. To know that a judgment is probable is to be certain that it is not certain. One may, therefore, mount a defense of scientific realism in the manner proposed which identifies scientific judgments as probable judgments about reality. However, since Badiou eschews the path of cognitional or epistemological analysis he is unable to withstand the arguments of instrumentalists and others who oppose the view, held by Popper and scientific realists that science has anything to do with attaining to truth about reality. Badiou contrasts the “truth” of scientific theories such as Einstein’s work on relativity with “mere opinions.” Under the heading of “mere opinions,” contrasted with the truth of science, he lumps together the biased views of politicians and the commonsense judgments we make, with their pragmatic orientation, an example of which is seen in the judgment that “it is stormy weather.”44 If Badiou’s view of scientific truth entails that science attains truth as definitive judgments, then he is in a very tiny minority and back with Ernest Mach, and if his view is that science at least aspires to, aims at truth he is with the Popperians. Either way, as the debates over scientific realism of the twentieth century witness, such “professions of confidence” in scientific truth, if they are mere advocacy, are defenseless against skeptical critiques which point to the obvious fact of the under-determination of scientific hypotheses by the data. On the other hand, if one admits that scientific judgments may be defended as probable judgments as to what is true of reality, then one can also go on to show that, cognitionally, they are continuous with many of the judgments of common sense which are equally the result of intelligent and reasonable inquiry regarding the data. The judgment that “it is stormy weather” can be wrong or right; I can mistake the condition of the weather by looking

44 Ethics, p. 81. For Badiou what he terms mere “encyclopaedic” knowledges are temporal and pragmatic, as opposed to truth, see L’être et l’événement, 368.

Badiou’s Metaphysical Basis for Ethics

137

through a window of smoked glass and judging that the weather is stormy. Further, the same intelligent and reasonable operations involved in making judgments about the weather using commonsense terms are the basis for scientific inquiry as to why there are such climatic conditions on this planet. Naturally, bias and prejudice can distort common sense and other types of judgment, including those in science. But this way forward of arguing for the judgments of science as probable judgments of truth is not open to Badiou. This is so because, first, his antiepistemological philosophy does not have the resources to do so and, secondly, because his own ontology is destructive of the claim that a science, such as physics, has anything to do with reality. Post-Cantorian mathematics, just as pre-Cantorian mathematics is compatible with possible worlds which have laws of physics quite unlike our world. Thus, not only does such mathematics of itself not determine which physics obtains, but if it is the only reality then this excludes that any physics obtains. Without an epistemological and cognitional basis, the invocation of Pascal’s wager is simply the advocacy of a leap of irrational faith. Implicit in Pascal’s own approach, as we have seen, is an estimation based on judgments of both fact and value taken to be rational. But if one has no place for the epistemological then one has no way of estimating intelligently and reasonably such background probable judgments of fact and value. Once again Badiou masks these deficiencies by invoking only examples from the history of mathematics and science which are generally regarded as instances of rational progress, but his own phenomenology is powerless to explain why we should privilege these over other options. Badiou describes radically new theories in science, such as Einstein’s special and general relativity theories, as events in the truth-process which “punch a hole” in “existing knowledges”; they are a radical, epistemic break with what went before.45 However, one needs to move beyond such

45 Ethics, p. 42. Barker seems to suggest that Badiou has no strong commitments concerning the view that science knows the real (see Barker, p. 98 and p. 167n6). However, Badiou’s own statements are hard to reconcile with Barker’s view. Badiou states “In the final analysis, physics—that is to say, the theory of matter—is mathematical. It is mathematical because, as the theory of the most objectified strata of the presented as such, it necessarily catches hold of beingas-being through its mathematicity. The relation between ‘what is presented’— for example, matter—and the theory of being-as-being can be described, empirically, as the relation between physics and mathematics.” (Ethics, Appendix p. 128) This does not fit with Barker’s claim. Rather it is a strong thesis on physics as revealing to us “being-as-being”. But then the level of “presentation” is that of scientific theory and Badiou can say nothing on that. If ontology is to do only

138

Insight and Analysis

rhetorical expressions of the “romantic-heroic” vision of the march of science to a fairly fine-grained cognitional analysis of what counts as continuity and discontinuity in science. No doubt one could also say of the theory that wars are caused here on earth by the moon’s periodic need for food that it is a theory that “punches a hole in existing knowledges” in a radical fashion. But what makes us say that the latter theory is utterly improbable and thus crackpot, whereas Einstein’s contributions, whatever their problems, are highly probable explanations of the data? However new a contribution such as Einstein’s is, it is still the case that the scientific community assesses such theories through intelligent inquiry and reasonable weighing of evidence in order to ground probable judgments as to what is the case. The development of science is not the circumvention of human intelligent and reasonable operations of assessment but occurs through their repeated application.

VI As we have seen, since Badiou’s is a nonepistemological philosophy, difficulties arise regarding how he grounds claims made with regard to “progress” or correct judgment in science, ethics and other areas of life. Badiou follows Lacan in seeing a tension between “mere” “knowledges” and truth, but without epistemological or cognitional resources he is not able to make a convincing case that there are such philosophical items and that they are distinguished and related in the way he claims they are. In fact, selfreferentially inconsistent and incoherent judgments, truth claims about knowledge and truth are plentiful in Badiou’s writings and those of commentators on his thought like Barker. Thus in his Manifeste pour la Philosophie Badiou writes that philosophy, “n’établit aucune vérité, mais [. . .] dispose un lieu des vérités.”46 Since such a claim cannot be anything other than a philosophical one, and as it is a judgment claiming to know what is true, it is incoherent. We find other claims about truth which are manifestly philosophical, not, say, mathematical, in Badiou’s writing such as the claim

with the restricted “is” of mathematical judgments, then how is one to evaluate the “is” in judgments of fact about the world? What realities are known in such judgments? The implication of his own statement would appear to be that ontology also has to do with the relation between physics and mathematics, not simply with mathematical judgments. 46 Badiou, Manifeste pour la philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1989), p. 18.

Badiou’s Metaphysical Basis for Ethics

139

that “A truth is the total positive infinite.”47 The latter is a claim to know something about truth, it is a judgment of truth at odds with the prior claim that philosophy knows no truths. But the picture becomes even more confused. Despite the agnostic (selfreferentially inconsistent claim) above from the 1989 work, Barker explains, in his outline of the distinctions between truth and knowledge, that for Badiou “Truth can always temporarily coincide with knowledge . . .” this is because, “for example, “the set of whole numbers” comprises an infinite set which is intuitive and hence immediately knowledge.”48 However this judgment directly contradicts one made earlier by Barker that, “Truth . . . remains ‘indiscernible’ . . . for knowledge”.49 Let us remind ourselves in this context of the cognitional claims implicit in such judgments, and that cognitional claims refer to the reality of our conscious operations. The affirmation that there are mathematical truths is a truth that has to be verified by reference to our cognitional experience of mathematical reasoning. It is a cognitional truth claim, therefore, and not a mathematical one. Further, the truth claim that there are only mathematical judgments is itself not a mathematical judgment, but a truth claim about the cognitional realities we name judgments. Barker’s own exposition of Badiou’s thought relies precisely upon our being able to verify in the reality of our cognitional operations that: (a) there is such a thing as “mere” knowledge, (b) it is different from truth, (c) sometimes these coincide. That reference is being made to the evidence of our conscious cognition is manifest in Barker’s own use of terms such as “intuitive.” However, Barker’s exposition and defense of Badiou’s claim that “mere” knowledge and truth do not always, or for the most part, coincide is quite unconvincing. Badiou believes a compelling case can be made for this distinction in the following manner. In the vulgar Marxist analysis of the “class of workers” the attempt is made to bring about the coincidence of “political truth” with historical knowledge. But, according to Badiou, this analysis is erroneous. The category of “workers,” understood in a Marxist fashion, is a matter of mere, historically located “knowledge.” But this knowledge does not coincide with the truth that is the mathematically infinite set “all workers.” This constitutes the argument in Badiou’s philosophy for the distinction

47 L’être et l’événement, 372. 48 Barker, pp. 95–96; see L’être et l’événement, 367–368. 49 Barker, p. 95.

140

Insight and Analysis

between truth (of an infinite set) and “mere” historical knowledge (of Marx’s workers).50 One should object here that the “epistemic category” of an infinite set is a mathematical truth because any item is grist to the mill. Anything will do as a constitutive member of a set for the purposes of set-theoretic elaboration: dodos, factory workers, dogs, instances of the letter b, or whatever. But Marxist or other socioeconomic theories also speak of groups, in an analysis of sociopolitical processes, and can be wrong or right in their characterization of these groups and the processes in which they are involved. They can reach truth in judgments about such groups and about the economic forces relevant to understanding them, or they can fail to do so. Naturally, the judgments involved will be like the probable judgment of the sciences, in which one may have evidence sufficient to affirm that this characterization is probably true, or probably not true of reality. But such a contrast, between judgments or truth claims about socioeconomic forces and groups, and settheoretic constructions, is not evidence for a distinction between truth on the one hand and “knowledge,” as something “less” than truth, on the other. Rather it is a distinction between mathematical or logical judgments of truth, on the one hand, and judgments aiming at the truth of sociopolitical situations on the other. If a meteorite destroyed planet earth in 20 years time, and there was no other future planet on which something akin to “industrial workers” occurred, then the set of all real, or existent “workers” would not be infinite. That would be true, as would the truth of the infinity of a mathematical set which took as its members “workers”(understood in Marx’s sense) as its (merely) conceptual constituents. Even a cursory acquaintance with the philosophical development and positions taken up by notable figures in the history of mathematics in the last 100 years, such as Frege, Cantor, Brouwer, Heyting, and Gödel demonstrates the way epistemological options influence a variety of interpretations of mathematics and of set-theory. Badiou’s lack of a detailed and argued approach in cognition and epistemology, then, means that he is unable to offer anything by way of adjudicating between rival claims in the philosophy of mathematics and, worse, is unable with any clarity to identify just where considerations of a mathematical nature end and other forms of philosophical analysis begin. Like Popper, therefore, Badiou is unable to justify his claim that there is truth. And his lack of such ability is not unrelated to his inability to show how his own claims concerning truth and its relation to knowledge are to be justified. As we have seen, some of his claims concerning truth in

50 Ibid., pp. 96–98.

Badiou’s Metaphysical Basis for Ethics

141

philosophy are self-referentially incoherent: he claims to achieve that which he denies he can achieve philosophically. And such confusions are not unrelated to his inability to justify his own claims about truth, knowledge and their relation.

VII Badiou’s point that the true significance of an event can only be seen in retrospect is well taken. However, such a point is examined from a number of angles by current philosophers of historiography and also by philosophers working on the ontology of events.51 Badiou’s discussions, then, are rather isolated and need to be brought into contact with developments in these areas of philosophical research. That the significance of an event is seen later on is, one might say, a commonplace in such discussions, but the various ways this is so, and the philosophical implications of various types of analysis are the more important factors in the discussion. It is the equivocal nature of Badiou’s statements of agnosticism regarding one’s initial estimation of what an event was, and what its implications are for life and action that throw up the most intractable problems for his approach. Thus, we have seen already the problems which arise for the attempt to apply Pascal’s wager in the way Badiou proposes. Further, the examples of radical events he offers seem to be ones that are selected because we can know a good deal about them and about their historical consequences. Badiou’s analysis of Haydn’s breakthrough in musical style involves him in making claims to know, not only that the inner nature of this development in music qualifies it as a radical “event,” but also what its consequences were and are for the history of music. It is hard to see how one’s being “radically faithful” to Haydn’s achievement is not to be based on these strong epistemic claims about the nature and significance of this development in musical style, rather than upon an agnostic or fideistic radical leap in the dark. Are there, then, no epistemic criteria to decide for or against my giving my all in fidelity, risking my life, on an interpretation that claims William McGonagall was the greatest poet in the English language, or that what we take to be a crackpot scientific view is, in fact, preferable to Quantum mechanics? Already by the 1920s the significance and novelty of Einstein’s work were becoming apparent in the scientific community, and

51 See Beards, Method in Metaphysics, chapter 7; also Beards, Objectivity and Historical Understanding (Aldershot and Brookfield, VA: Ashgate, 1997), Part II.

142

Insight and Analysis

further implications of Einstein’s work will no doubt become apparent as science continues to develop. But the fact that such future developments, whatever they may be, are inevitable does not mean that we have no reason here and now to privilege Einstein’s theories as important, as having “event” status, both in terms of their inner content, and in terms of the effects they have had on science so far. Finally, Badiou’s metaphysical claims concerning events, that they are “beyond being,” are as self-referentially confused as Levinas’ claims about the other, which were discussed above. The morality Badiou assumes, but fails to justify, is also at once undermined by his own metaphysics. The question of how to treat someone, or something, is inextricably bound up with what that someone, thing, is. If I violently wave smoke away from above a heated frying pan, I take it that I have not wronged that smoke in the way I would have done had I used such violent action toward another human being. The way we ought to treat differently human beings, animals, plants, and minerals has to do with what they are. Now if all such things are mere epiphenomena, there is no moral difference between my thrusting a sword into someone’s heart, because the shape of his or her nose irritates me, and my extinguishing the “life” of a cartoon character appearing on the television set by turning off the machine. Badiou’s ontological vision of persons as epiphenomenal, then, at once deconstructs the basic morality that he assumes in his arguments in Ethics— the basic morality which presumes that his readers will reject as horrific the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi regime. One of France’s most prominent analytical philosophers, Pascal Engel, has remarked that it may be all very well for American analysts like Putnam to proclaim that there are currently no substantive differences between analytical philosophy and continental philosophy, but this is not the experience of those analytical philosophers like himself who are faced with the challenges of working at close quarters with continental thinkers.52 In the preface to the English translation of Being and Event Badiou notes that his work has not hitherto been well received by his French analytical counterparts, despite his wish to bridge the gap between the analytical and continental worlds of philosophy.53 It may well be that Engel is one of the francophone critics Badiou has in mind. Engel has occasionally turned his attention away from his major concerns in current analytical philosophy to offer critiques of continental philosophical trends, and has urged a critical approach in

52 Pascal Engel (1999), “Analytical Philosophy and Cognitive Norms,” The Monist, 82: 2, 218–234. 53 Badiou, Being and Event, pp. xiii–xiv.

Badiou’s Metaphysical Basis for Ethics

143

this regard which includes the deployment of self-referential arguments against some of the lines of thought offered by continental thinkers.54 I have, in fact, adopted a similar approach in the present chapter, although I believe I have developed it beyond what is envisaged by Engel, thanks to the resources of Bernard Lonergan’s critical realism. In this chapter I have been quite critical of Badiou’s philosophy. However, I should conclude by commenting that I see signs of encouragement in the trend his thought represents. It is encouraging to see that post-continental philosophy is once again engaging with ethics and with metaphysics. In its commitment to the latter it is at one with the renewed concern with metaphysics now so widespread in analytical philosophy.

54 Pascal Engel, The Monist , also see his “The Decline and Fall of French NietzscheoStructuralism,” in French Philosophy and the American Academy, B. Smith (ed.), The Monist Philosophical Library, 1994, 21–41.

This page intentionally left blank

Part 4 Ethics

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 7

Moral Conversion and Problems in Proportionalism Implicit in the notion of “seminal thinker” is the idea that the achievements of such thinkers open out new perspectives, new possibilities for further questioning and investigation which were not evident before. Bernard Lonergan is clearly a twentieth-century theologian whose thought deserves the appellation “seminal.” And integral to Lonergan’s endeavors was the awareness that his contributions had significance only insofar as they proved fruitful for the labors of others who, perhaps, were concerned with issues that were not his concern, who could well take a different stance on some point from that taken by Lonergan, while benefitting from his fundamental achievement. It was Lonergan’s conviction that such uses of his approach would witness to its vitality and fundamental validity.1 There is a danger, perhaps inevitable, that the contributions of a thinker such as Lonergan will receive the status accorded those of a modern “authority” in the theological literature, such that the demanding but rewarding effort of critically engaging his thought is sidetracked. What is important in trying to bring Lonergan’s approach to bear on contemporary theological debates are not attempts to second-guess what such an “authority” would have said on such and such a topic had he lived long enough, or taken interest in it. That is to miss the point of Lonergan’s genuine contribution: a contribution which enhances one’s own capacities for novel and creative solutions to new questions. A symptom of such unfortunate tendencies is the way one comes across phrases from Lonergan’s work wielded as “slogans” in theological discussion; a notable example, evident in the area which is the focus of this chapter, being the use of the phrase “the distinction between classical culture and historical mindedness.” That such gestures can be less than enlightening is evident when we reflect that, to much of the academic world, to many in the world of academic philosophy, both Anglo-Saxon and continental, Lonergan’s oeuvre will appear scandalously foundationalist and “ethnocentric.” To benefit from Lonergan’s work in attempting to be “on the level of our times” is not to accommodate that work in some facile way to the fashions of the contemporary academy, but to engage those philosophical and cultural viewpoints in a manner that does not shrink from

1 “An Interview with Fr. Bernard Lonergan, S.J.,” in A Second Collection (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974).

148

Insight and Analysis

indicating the incoherencies and, indeed, moral dangers present in them, while respecting their genuine advances. The concern of the present chapter is foundational issues in ethical theory which have a bearing on contemporary debates in moral theology. A contention I wish to argue for is that there is incoherence in the ethical theory of proportionalism which demonstrates that theory is counter-positional. In recent years a number of arguments have been marshaled against proportionalism in both the philosophical and theological literature.2 My aim here is not to repeat those charges of inconsistency or incoherence but to take a slightly different approach. This approach does, as I will suggest below, mesh with some of the other criticisms of proportionalism that are current, but its fundamental elements are suggested by Lonergan’s sketch of a methodical approach to ethics, in chapter 18 of Insight. I shall also treat of some antiproportionalist considerations which arise from arguments in Lonergan’s Thomist-inspired theological work concerning notions implicit in the principle of double-effect. However, the attempt to understand the import of Lonergan’s sketch of a Method of Ethics for the debate on proportionalism has also led me into one of those interpretative puzzles which have engaged Lonergan scholars in recent years: how does the approach to ethics in Insight comport with that in Method in Theology? Working at such questions is part of the creative engagement with another’s thought which my reflections in the first paragraph touched upon. For, it is often by wrestling with what is obscure and difficult in a seminal thinker that one makes discoveries relevant to questions which have an importance beyond that of interpretation; as Lonergan’s years reaching up to the mind of Aquinas testify, the struggle of interpretation is a

2 See, for example, Alan Donagan, The Theory of Morality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 200; Bartholomew Kiely (1985), “The Impracticality of Proportionalism,” Gregorianum 66: 656–666; John Finnis, Fundamentals of Ethics (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1983), pp. 86–105; Germain Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus, Vol. 1, (Chicago, IL: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983), pp. 141–172; William E. May, An Introduction to Moral Theology (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing), 1994, pp. 107–132; Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (eds), Utilitarianism and Beyond, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Samuel Scheffler (ed), Consequentialism and its Critics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Some attempts, in the philosophical literature, to argue for consequentialism include: Michael Slote, Common-Sense Morality and Consequentialism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); David Sosa (January 1993), “Consequences of Consequentialism,” Mind 102: 405, 101–122; Peter Caws (July 1995), “Minimal Consequentialism,” Philosophy 70: 273, 313–339.

Moral Conversion and Problems in Proportionalism

149

most fruitful way to “dispose the phantasm” for insight into insight. My critique of the basic strategy of proportionalist metaethics will occur in the context of a discussion of the relation between the approach to ethics in Insight and that in Method. For, it is through such an investigation that one can best appreciate the upshot of Lonergan’s contributions for the current debate on moral absolutes and moral norms. While my reflections on the relations between the metaethical discussion in Insight and Method are in no way intended as a putting in their proper place all of the pieces in the puzzle, they are put forward as interpretative suggestions which, I believe, clear away some fairly widespread misconceptions. Such misconceptions could be characterized along the lines of saying that in Method Lonergan abandoned the “rigourist,” “intellectualist” approach to ethics which had marked the “sketch” in Insight, for a more “diffuse” phenomenological one, which perhaps suggests, at best, some form of “situation ethics.” The area of the ethical in the development of Lonergan’s thought is, of course, linked with another area of interpretative debate in Lonergan scholarship: the question of feelings. My intention here is not to engage in a study of these important related issues, although it is relevant to the discussion in hand to note the way an interpreter as versed in Lonergan’s thought as Fr. F.E. Crowe has warned us of the danger of seeing a later version of Lonergan almost at odds with an earlier one in this area.3 It is to these interpretative issues that I will first turn, before going on to discuss problems in proportionalist metaethics—problems which I believe become evident when one reflects upon the proportionalist stance in the light of the methodological approach to ethics Lonergan’s work adumbrates.

1. Method in Ethics: Insight and Method In Insight the good was the intelligent and reasonable. In Method the good is a distinct notion.4

In such comments as the one above, Lonergan made it clear that his thought in the area of metaethics had undergone development. Along with the affirmation that the notion of the “good” had now emerged as a distinct notion

3 Frederick Crowe, note 1, in “Editorial Notes,” Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: Collection, F.E. Crowe and R. Doran (eds.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 281. 4 “Insight Revisited,” Second Collection, p. 277.

150

Insight and Analysis

in his thought, went the view that the use of the term “will,” as that of “intellect” in Insight, indicated that the analysis of the fourth level of human operations, the level of responsible reflection and decision had not been sufficiently differentiated from a “faculty psychology” approach.5 It is with regard to this latter point that valuable work has already been done by Philip McShane and Kenneth Melchin in analyzing just what the development from Insight to Method has been and how, in some ways, the results of that development are nevertheless anticipated in some fashion in elements to be found in the discussion in chapter 18.6 So, Melchin argues, one can witness in this chapter the way Lonergan has assembled the materials to further differentiate the cognitional moments involved in the level of operations to which Thomistic philosophers refer as the faculty of “will.” As we shall observe below, in a discussion of the “judgment of value,” the presentation in Insight draws attention both to the continuity between “intellect” and “will,” and to their distinctive differences. The “level” of “will” involves the cognitive component of direct and reflective insights, although in the case of “will” such insights occur within the context of a finality with practical intent. As Melchin makes clear, however, given the process of differentiation that is underway in chapter 18, these “materials” are not always systematized and presented in as felicitous a manner as they might be. There are two questions to which I now wish to turn regarding the continuity between metaethical views in Lonergan’s two major works: first, looking at Lonergan’s later writing, what should we make of his remark, quoted above, to the effect that the good is now a notion distinct from that of the intelligent and reasonable? Secondly, how do the earlier and later positions comport with regard to the possibility of the formulation of an ethical code, an ethical code that, perhaps, includes absolute or universal prescriptions? In remarks of his later period on the transcendental notion of value, Lonergan clearly wished to forestall misapprehensions of what this refinement to his thinking entailed. So, for example, he insists, neither moral nor

5 Second Collection, pp. 276–277. 6 Philip Mcshane, Wealth of Self and Wealth of Nations (Hicksville, NY: Exposition Press, 1975), chapters 2 and 6; Kenneth Melchin, History, Ethics and Emergent Probability (Lanham, MD: University of America Press, 1987), pp. 227–233. For a somewhat different approach from mine to the relation of Lonergan’s work to current issues in ethics and moral theology see, Kenneth Melchin (1991), “Moral Knowledge and the Structure of Cooperative Living,” Theological Studies, 52: 495–523.

Moral Conversion and Problems in Proportionalism

151

religious conversions take one “beyond being.”7 But is it true to say that in his later thought the good is in no way identifiable with the intelligent and reasonable? I think there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that this is not the case. First, in the 1968 lecture “The Subject” Lonergan writes, “. . . besides their distinction” and their functional interdependence, the levels of consciousness are united by the unfolding of a single transcendental intending of plural, interchangeable objectives.8 In the footnote to this passage Lonergan explains that these transcendental objectives so intended are, approximately, the scholastic transcendentals, ens, unum, verum, bonum, which are, therefore, “convertible.” The same point is made in chapter 1 of Method, and is echoed in the later essay “Religious Knowledge.”9 It is true to say, then, that it remains the case in Lonergan’s later thought that there is a sense in which the good is the intelligible. Secondly, that “being,” “intelligibility” and “good” are interchangeable, according to Lonergan’s later writing, and that, therefore, in some sense the good is still seen as the intelligible and the reasonable, is further evident from the recurrence in Lonergan’s later work of the notion of the “surd of sin.”10 For, the notion of sin as a “surd” indicates that absence of good is precisely the absence of intelligibility and reasonableness. Also significant is Lonergan’s statement, in the post-Method paper “Religious Knowledge,” to the effect that to act responsibly is to meet the requirement of being reasonable. He writes, “. . . we are also responsible, and in our responsibility we may discern another primitive and basic instance of normativeness. It is, so to speak, the reasonableness of action”11 (emphasis added). Finally, the discussion of the “Question of God,” taking up as it does the discussion of God in chapter 19 of Insight, into the context of Method’s discussion of religious experience, implies that God is the ultimate answer to the question of value; the answer to the question of the value of our own questioning, and of the universe of proportionate being of which it is a part, is the “final cause” which is God’s goodness.12 But then such an answer, into

7 Second Collection, p. 228. 8 Second Collection, p. 81. 9 “Religious Knowledge,” in A Third Collection (London: Geoffery Chapman, 1985), note 8, p. 145. 10 See, “A Post-Hegelian Philosophy of Religion,” Third Collection, pp. 214–215; “Questionnaire on Philosophy,” Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies, 2/2, 15–16; and the unpublished late paper “Moral Theology and the Human Sciences,” p. 5. 11 Third Collection, p. 143. 12 “To deliberate about x is to ask whether x is worthwhile. To deliberate about deliberating is to ask whether any deliberating is worthwhile. Has “worthwhile”

152

Insight and Analysis

which we have no direct insight, but which we anticipate heuristically as the total satisfaction of our quest, is an answer to a question which seeks to understand the “what for?” of our own question and the world order of which it is a part. And, clearly, Lonergan affirms God as the ground of value, as the intelligible explanation for the question of the purpose of our existence, not only in this discussion in Method but in the metaphysical sketch of world order and its integral finality, in the late paper “Mission and the Spirit.”13 This is a brief summary of points that deserve further investigation which it is not my intention to pursue here. The principal point, it seems to me, is that in Lonergan’s later writing the “good” remains the “reasonable” insofar as his position continues to be that the reasons for the existence of a being involve not only formal, material, and exemplary causes but, in addition, final causes. And it can be emphasized that, on Lonergan’s view, a final cause is not some intuited or imagined “pull” of A toward B, but a grasp of B’s explanatory relation to A, a relation of intelligibility grasped as part of the answer to the question “why does this being exist?” I believe, therefore, that, despite some appearances to the contrary, there is an element of continuity between Lonergan’s earlier and later work pertaining to the good, in as much as the good is still in some way seen as the intelligible, the reasonable: the universe is a truly good order because of the final cause of God’s goodness; our actions are good if they are reasonable, and they are not good if they are instances where there is an absence of reason for choosing x, an absence which is the surd of sin. Turning to the question of the implications of Lonergan’s work for the development of ethical norms, I think Mark Frisby has quite rightly drawn attention to Lonergan’s 1967 “Response to Professor Novak”: Though I did not in Insight feel called upon to work out a code of ethics, neither did I exclude such a code. On the contrary I drew a parallel between ethics and metaphysics. In metaphysics I not only assigned a basis in invariant

any ultimate meaning? . . . Does there or does there not necessarily exist a transcendent, intelligent ground of the universe? Is that ground or are we the primary instance of moral consciousness?” Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1972), pp. 102–103; “. . . God would be the ultimate final cause of any universe, the ground of its value, and the ultimate objective of all finalistic striving.” Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1957), p. 664. 13 “Absolute finality is to God. For every end is an instance of the good, and every instance of the good has its ground and goal in absolute goodness.” Third Collection, p. 24.

Moral Conversion and Problems in Proportionalism

153

structures but also derived from that basis a metaphysics with a marked family resemblance to traditional views. A similar family resemblance, I believe, would be found to exist between traditional ethics and an ethics that, like metaphysics, was explicitly aware of itself as a system on the move.14

The fact that these remarks were made when Method was well under way is highly significant in appraising the degree of continuity between Lonergan’s approach to ethics in the development of his thinking. As I will suggest below, the basis offered for the adumbration of ethical norms in Insight remains implicitly operative in the chapter on the “Human Good” in Method. But what of the emphasis of Method on the concrete moral decisions of the Aristotelian “just man,” whose authentic creativity cannot be encapsulated in general formulae? Does not this new emphasis imply a shift away from putative ethical systems? The very fact that it is Aristotelian phronesis (what is taken over by St. Thomas into his discussion of prudentia) that is invoked here should give us pause before leaping to the conclusion that Method rejects the possibility of ethical norms. Lonergan’s position, as I see it, stands precisely within the Aristotelian-Thomist ethical tradition for which general norms, as Lonergan observes, tend to be prohibitive in nature, but which has a vision of the just person who, while observing these norms, is good insofar as he or she is striving to become virtuous and act in accord with the good with an “antecedent willingness” marked by a spontaneous, connatural identification with human goods.15 Such an open creativity is witness to the recurrent potential for free and responsible contributions to the emergence of future orders of human flourishing. That certain choices are definitively evil and destructive, but that the good can never be “pinned down” in quite the same way is expressed by the scholastic maxim: bonum ex integra causa, malum ex quocumque defectu. That Lonergan had a

14 “Theories of Inquiry,” Second Collection, pp. 39–40; see Mark E. Frisby (1989), “Lonergan’s Method in Ethics,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, LXIII: 235–256, 235. 15 It may be said that the whole moral thrust of Lonergan’s enterprise in Insight is to identify human genuineness, so as to invite one to strive toward the “antecedent willingness” that enables one to live genuinely (pp. 700–701); such an investigation inevitably points to the facts of moral impotence and the need for a divine solution. Through such analyses Lonergan hopes to “inform” the prudent praxis of persons whose “familiarity and mastery” of particular situations is what is required for upright moral judgments. The theme of the Aristotelian “Just man” makes its appearance in this very general way in Insight. But, it is precisely Lonergan’s aim to “inform” that praxis through a methodical ethics, issuing in some “precepts,” which avoids “vaguely postulating prudence” (p. 604).

154

Insight and Analysis

greater interest in promoting creative ethical cooperation in such areas as macroeconomics does not entail that he had no use for general ethical norms, which may require formulation in a prescriptive manner. As we have seen from the passage quoted above, this is clearly not the case.16 But if in Insight there is sketched out the basis for an ethics with a family resemblance to traditional ethics, what becomes of this approach in Method? Are there ethical norms implicit in Method’s discussion of the human good? To examine this question it is helpful, first, to look at the notion of the “judgment of value.” For, if it is possible to develop an ethics that is somewhat akin to the traditional Aristotelian-Thomist ethics it must be the case that there are some definitive judgments as to the value or disvalue of certain acts or courses of action. Can we reach the virtually unconditioned in cases where this would be the answer to the question “is x truly good?” That is, are there cases in which we know that the conditions specifying some action as good, and another as evil, are fulfilled in an unambiguous fashion? If there were such, then there would be judgments of value that are akin to the invulnerable judgments of fact which, Lonergan argues, may be arrived at through self-affirmation and the metaphysics “derived” from it. Certainly, Lonergan’s position in Insight is that there are such cases. For, although “Practical Reflection,” or the judgment of value, since it is only knowledge of value, does not remove the need for further deliberation and choice to bring about a proposed action, still in noetic terms, it may reach a virtually unconditioned. That is a judgment in which all relevant questions on whether x is truly good or bad are known to be met. So, Lonergan writes, “In so far as it is a knowing, it can reach an internal term, for one can grasp the virtually unconditioned and thereby attain certitude on the possibility of a proposed course of action . . . on its obligatoriness.”17 However, it might appear that in Method, there is a move away from cognitive criteria, the “grasp of conditions as fulfilled,” in the judgment of value to criteria which are feelings. So, in a passage which follows the description of the criteria involved in the judgment of fact (grasp of sufficiency of evidence) Lonergan writes, “The drive to value rewards success in self-transcendence with a happy conscience and saddens failure with unhappy conscience.”18 Such passages can suggest the idea that all we can say of the good, of the criteria for deciding what is good, is that it is what will be chosen by the

16 “Healing and Creating in History,” Third Collection, pp. 100–109. 17 Insight, p. 611. 18 Method, p. 35.

Moral Conversion and Problems in Proportionalism

155

virtuous man, who in choosing will experience peace of conscience. That this is not the way to read Lonergan’s position is suggested by his response to Professor Novak quoted above, a response made in the period of his writing Method, and there is further evidence in Method, and elsewhere in Lonergan’s late work, that such a reading is partial and incomplete. To that evidence I now turn. That the “feeling of peace” in the conscience of the “just” person is anticipated as a statistically likely accompaniment to a correct judgment of value and choice, and is not intended as the experiential criterion for such judgments being correct is, I think, implied by Lonergan’s remarks in Method concerning the way our moral feelings, “have to be cultivated, strengthened, refined, criticized and pruned of oddities.”19 Clearly, there can be criticism of our feelings, and given that authenticity is ever a precarious achievement we have to be vigilant lest our “peace of conscience” is that experienced by someone less morally cultivated than the “virtuous person.” I think it also significant that, in the late lecture, “Religious Knowledge” Lonergan writes, “Just as we cannot be reasonable and pass judgment beyond or against the evidence, so too we cannot be responsible without adverting to what is right and what is wrong, without enjoying the peace of a good conscience when we choose what is right, without suffering the disquiet of an unhappy conscience when we choose what is wrong.”20 It is clear from this passage that the feelings involved do not determine the choices as wrong or right, but accompany and confirm the choices so made. But, are there determinate examples of truly right and truly wrong choices in the discussion in Method, of true values, correct judgments of value which would be chosen by the Aristotelian “virtuous man?” Clearly, there are: for the transcendental precepts, be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible, are the specification of that authenticity which is the exercise of true virtue. Further, it is through the argument of the first and second chapters of the book that persons are identified as “originating values”—as potential sources of authentic choosing. Therefore, persons are true values and, clearly, the Aristotelian virtuous man is one who should recognize this value as a true value; for it is the value of his own authenticity. As Lonergan writes, Terminal values are the values that are chosen; true instances of the particular good, a true good of order, a true scale of preferences regarding values and satisfactions. Correlative to terminal values are the originating values that do the choosing: they are the authentic persons achieving self-transcendence by their

19 Method, p. 38. 20 Third Collection, pp. 143–144.

156

Insight and Analysis

good choices. Since man can know and choose authenticity and self-transcendence, originating and terminal values can coincide.21 (emphasis added)

It is not the case, then, that Method leaves us with no more than the generic notion of the true value as whatever would bring peace to the conscience of the virtuous man were it chosen by him. The true values constitutive of one as virtuous are specified to some degree. The open-endedness of creative goodness means, as we said above, that such values specify the necessary but not sufficient conditions of the concrete performance of the virtuous person, but the designation “virtuous” is not left as a vacuous or questionbegging one by Lonergan. In fact, it is the affirmation that one may come to know oneself as an originating value quoted above, that connects the discussion not only with that of transcendental method in the first chapter of Method, but with the treatment of the method of ethics in Insight. For, the argument that one is truly an originating value, insofar as one lives up to the demands of the transcendental precepts, is one which is established in the self-referential fashion of the argument pursued in chapter 1 of Method, and in chapter 18 of Insight, precisely as the prolongation of the arguments deployed to establish the positions in cognitional theory, epistemology, and metaphysics. To come to affirm the transcendental precepts, or the “immanent order” of one’s cognitional structure, as true values is to answer a question of value in a judgment of value which claims to reach a virtually unconditioned: the claim is that, in these cases at least, the conditions are fulfilled such that the value of this order is known to be good. It is relevant to note that there are features of the discussion in Method which direct our attention to the purely noetic acts of the level of responsibility, in a way that Insight does not. So, the specialization Dialectic involves an “evaluative history” which is an attempt to appraise the moral worth of human acts and developments in the past. Now, while this has some practical import, for the study of history enlightens our present opportunities and choices, clearly the value judgments we make are not quite like those we make in the process of practical deliberation. In making moral judgments on our past life or human persons and communities in the past, our judgments are more akin to those concerning the goodness of world order, which we alluded to above when touching upon the metaphysical dimension of the good. In such a judgment of value we are saying not that such and such would be good, but that x was or is truly good. We saw in the

21 Method, p. 51.

Moral Conversion and Problems in Proportionalism

157

quotation above from Insight that Lonergan there allowed for a grasp of the virtually unconditioned in the case of a value judgment which grasped that some course of action was, indeed, morally obligatory. When one considers the area of the evaluative history envisaged in Method’s dialectic we can reflect on the way a value judgment on some past action may grasp that what actually occurred was, in fact, morally good or bad. But, what is of further interest is the fact that we actually “derive” our transcendental notion of authenticity, of ourselves as true, originating values, from just such instances of value judgments reached in the process of self-appropriation. With a nod in the direction of Hume’s censures of attempts to derive an “ought” from an “is,” I now wish to examine the way in which Lonergan “derives” the transcendental precepts as moral precepts from self-referential argument. Such an analysis will, I think, throw light upon the question of invulnerable value judgments which, as I have said, bears upon the formulation of ethical norms. The strategy of identifying position and counterposition via the deployment of self-referential arguments not only results in the self-affirmation of oneself as a “factual knower” but as a moral knower and doer. Lonergan deploys several such arguments with regard to the fourth level of human consciousness, the level of responsibility. In his work selfrefuting arguments pertaining to the level of responsibility occur against hedonism, Freudian reductionism, against the option to suspend choice, and against the wholesale denial of this level of operations.22 How do such arguments function and what results from their deployment? In Understanding and Being, Lonergan makes the illuminating remark that the four levels of interrelated cognitional operations, leading to the judgment of fact and the judgment of value, constitute an “immanent order.”23 It is to the authentic operation of this “immanent order” that the transcendental precepts of Method, Be attentive, Be intelligent, Be reasonable, Be responsible, refer.24 And we may note, further, the way Lonergan refers to these precepts as “immanent norms” in the late lecture, “Natural Right and Historical Consciousness.”25 We may recall that the judgment of value is the answer to a question, “is this x, this order, truly good?” Now, since our conscious awareness of the notion of value includes the awareness that the “immanent order” of our

22 See, Insight, pp. 600, 602, 606; Method, p. 18. 23 Understanding and Being (The Halifax Lectures, 1958), E. Morelli and M. Morelli, R.E. Crowe, R. Doran and T. Daly (ed.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 233. 24 Method, pp. 20, 53, 55, 231–232. 25 “Natural Right and Historical Mindedness,” Third Collection, pp. 172–174.

158

Insight and Analysis

own cognitional activities must flourish in order to know the good, and to do it, we are aware of this order as a true value. We question and doubt any proposed value in accord with the conscious exigencies of the notion of value itself. The question “but is it really valuable, truly good?,” like the question which heads toward the judgment of factual truth, is aware that nothing short of sufficient evidence, fulfillment of conditions will meet its demands for a completely satisfying answer. But then, since one must acknowledge this finality and its exigencies as that which orients one to knowing the good and toward doing it, one has to accept that this immanent order is really and truly good. To will the end of doing what is good as a good is to will the “means,” the immanent cognitional order, as a good. One’s “suspicion” of any putative good as not, perhaps, really being good testifies to one’s awareness that it is bad, (not good), to judge that this x is truly good, and to act as if it were so. If one were to throw into question, in some nihilistic or skeptical way, any putative good as truly good one would be claiming that the denial ought to be made, the pretence exposed, that it was a value to do so. And this denial would be an implicit recognition that the good of the immanent order of cognitional, evaluative structure was a true value insofar as it entered into the denial as an intrinsic, conditioning factor. Just as in any other case of self-appropriation, then, what is required is to render the implicit explicit through attention to the data of consciousness, and through inquiry which terminates in the judgment that this is indeed the case: that this finality, with its exigencies, is given in consciousness. However, we may note a further aspect to the “reduplication” of our immanent structure in self-affirmation here. For, beyond the factual affirmation that affirms it to be the case that this finality for knowing and doing the good is given in the data of consciousness, there is the further judgment that this is indeed a true value and, further, that I ought to choose it as such and act upon that decision. Just as the judgment of fact here involves the grasp of the conditions as fulfilled, such that there is no further relevant question that this hypothesis of finality is true, so the further judgment of value is a grasp that the conditions are fulfilled in the case of the hypothesis that this finality and its exigencies is a true value. For, we saw that to deny this value is to have the evidence to hand in conscious process that this is indeed a true value. The demand for consistency between knowing and doing, therefore, requires of me that I act according to the exigencies of this conscious finality if I am to be authentic. And, again, to argue intelligently, reasonably, and responsibly against following through on this value judgment would be inconsistent performance. For it would be performance consciously aware of acting in accord with the finality one grasped intelligently and affirmed reasonably.

Moral Conversion and Problems in Proportionalism

159

We can, then, respond to the Humean objection that an “ought” is not to be derived from an “is” by reflecting on how it is legitimate for Lonergan to move from the “is” of the account of the four levels of cognitional operations to the “oughts” of the fourfold transcendental precepts. The most direct response is to point out that the arguments of Hume, or anyone else, only occur and only succeed with others insofar as persons are choosing to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible; that they are being responsible in living up to the demands of attention, intelligence, and reasonableness, in cases concerning fact, value, the development of moral theory or whatever. Lonergan’s “derivation” of the “ought” of transcendental precepts, or immanent norms, from the “is” of cognitional theory is, then, simply a matter of rendering explicit what is implicit in any case of human debate or argument that would be authentic, that would overcome bias in order to meet exigencies which we are aware we must meet if we are to attain to truth and value and act upon them. Since such immanent norms are operative in honest argument one cannot consistently argue against them. For, having embarked upon debate the only course would seem to be silence, yet that would not be “the complete silence of the animal that offers neither excuse nor explanation for its complacent absorption in sensitive routines”,26 but the explained, committed, silence of the skeptic. In the light of the above, I believe it is not too difficult to determine the relationship in Lonergan’s thought between the method of ethics sketched in Insight, the treatment of the Human Good in Method, and the remarks on the possibility of ethical norms in the 1967 “Response to Professor Novak.” The transcendental precepts of Method are the immanent norms of authentic human being, reflection upon which may yield an ethics “with a family resemblance” to Aristotelian-Thomist ethics. Such ethics would never entirely “pin down” or specify the concrete features of creative good effected by the truly good person, but like metaphysics it would specify the broad contours of what could be understood to be good rather than bad. Coming to know and affirm these immanent norms as truly good would, further, be an instance of arriving at judgments of value similar to the judgments of truth of cognitional theory: for such judgments would be instances in which the virtually unconditioned is reached; where denial of value would provide further evidence that these norms are good, insofar as they are operative in the conscious notion of value itself. For we are conscious that our attempts to do what is right are dependent upon our answering the question of value, which is dependent upon our knowledge of the factual, known through verified insight into data. This awareness of “sublation”

26 Insight, p. 329.

160

Insight and Analysis

is not like the dependency inferred to be the case in natural process, but is consciously experienced as intelligible emanation within us. Within the human spirit lies the primordial exigency for a consistency between self-consciousness and the products of self-expression. Thus, there is the demand for truth in judgment about self which acknowledges the incoherence, inconsistency, of claims falsified by the data of consciousness. And this demand for consistency extends into the area of action as a demand for consistency between “factual” knowing and moral knowing, and between both of these and human doing. Implicit in the notion of value is the awareness that any such inconsistency fails to achieve the fundamental good which this consistency is experienced to be: it is a good, a value, which we cannot deny to be so by dint of that very exigency for consistency itself. It was noted above that Lonergan deployed self-referential arguments against several theories which were seen to be counterpositional with regard to the level of responsibility. I believe that such an argument can be developed against the core notion in the moral theory of proportionalism. Reflecting on how and why such an argument shows up problems in proportionalist theory will provide further opportunity to reflect on the import of Lonergan’s thought for the development of ethical norms, and the question of absolute moral norms.

2. Proportionalism The classical utilitarianism of Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick included hedonism as an essential element, although increasingly sophisticated attempts were made to accommodate intuitions which suggested other “basic goods.” It is not the intention here to go into the history of arguments which moved utilitarianism, subsequently known as consequentialism or proportionalism, beyond a hedonist metaethics to an acknowledgment of more than one “good.” So it is that contemporary, or late twentieth-century forms allow “goods” beyond “pleasure,” and some forms even deny that this is a good at all.27 Other familiar variations include “Act” and “Rule” proportionalism, and versions which suggest some kind of “mixed economy,” involving elements from other ethical approaches. What I take to be the central tenet of proportionalism, the adoption of which would identify a position as being such, is the view that an act is to be identified as “good” insofar as the good

27 For an example of an ethical position adopting consequentialism but rejecting pleasure as a basic good see, Thomas Hurka, Perfectionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Moral Conversion and Problems in Proportionalism

161

consequences which result from it are either equal to, or greater than, an alternative choice in a given situation. The good act is the act which maximizes good consequences; the “bad” act is the act with bad consequences, or which fails to maximize good consequences to the same degree as an alternative choice. As I said above, it is not my intention to rehearse the criticisms made of proportionalist ethics in the literature, although I will reflect on some of these criticisms in the light of the analysis offered here. What I wish to argue is that, in the light of the foregoing analysis of Lonergan’s approach to ethics, proportionalism may be seen to be counterpositional. The proportionalist position is that a given act is to be determined as good or bad in terms of the consequences which flow from it. However, insofar as the proportionalist is attempting to argue intelligently, reasonably, and responsibly, he or she is implicitly committed to the stance that the immanent order of cognitional process is truly a good irrespective of the consequences which flow from operating in accord with the immanent norms of that order, which are formulated in the transcendental precepts; that is, irrespective of consequences beyond the requirement that I meet the exigencies that demand that I attempt to be intelligent, reasonable in coming to know the factual truth, and responsible in coming to know the good and in deciding to act accordingly. Implicit in the proportionalist’s arguing is the acknowledgment of the value of affirming the truth of an ethical theory and deciding to act in accord with that affirmation, and all the conditioning cognitional acts which enter into the process which arrives at such an affirmation. Insofar as the proportionalist is committed to the transcendental precepts he or she will admit that it is bad, not good, to accept a moral theory as true, and decide to act upon it, if there be contradictions in the theory or insufficiency of evidence to ground the theory. Naturally, it is along these lines that we find criticisms of proportionalism being made in the literature. But I know of no proportionalist who responds to such criticisms by saying that problems of coherence or evidence are irrelevant to whether or not proportionalism should be accepted as a true moral theory, or that it is simply established beyond all argument in some mystical intuition. If there were such responses they would be such as to exclude the proportionalist from reasonable and responsible debate; it would mark the proportionalist as one who had turned his or her back on the good of the transcendental precepts and, had, therefore, forfeited the right to be given a hearing by those who wish to know which moral theory is correct. Let us take an historical example. In his monumental and influential work, The Method of Ethics the Victorian philosopher Henry Sidgwick argued, as one more

162

Insight and Analysis

swayed by utilitarianism than by any other theory of morals, that utilitarianism could not reasonably convince the egotist that he ought to abandon his egotism in favor of utilitarianism. As such, Sidgwick implicitly acknowledged the goods given formulated expression in the transcendental precepts. For, his argument was to the effect that someone ought not to accept and, therefore, act in accord with an ethical theory (utilitarianism) if that theory could not be shown to be reasonably compelling.28 Proportionalism is not in some privileged position with regard to its rivals. Any moral theory results from our asking the question “What should I do?” and pursuing this into the theoretical domain. The answer to that question is not given in some blinding intuition prior to the raising and answering of the question. Thus, every theory is, so to speak, in the same boat, insofar as it is initially an hypothesis which may or may not be confirmed. But then, proportionalism, as any other ethical theory, must bow to the demands of the immanent order of cognitional theory and its finality. It cannot, under pain of self-referential inconsistency, weigh the putative “good” of the exigencies and demands for intelligibility, truth, moral truth, and moral action, against some estimation of results and declare that acting in accord with these exigencies is, when all is considered, not a good or a value. Clearly, arguments to the effect that, in the long run it is better, has better effects, if people do authentically seek truth and act accordingly, are, while no doubt true, irrelevant to the establishment of whether these cognitional acts of moral truth-seeking be good or bad. For, such an argument would simply beg the question as to whether proportionalism, and the proportionalist determination of an act as good or bad, is true; it would simply assume without argument that it was. As we saw above, the reversal of arguments such as proportionalism involves attention to the data of consciousness, insight into that data and critical verification of the insight, with the further question arising as to the good of the finality identified in cognitional structure and its dynamisms. Such investigation, then, results in the judgments of value concerning the value of the immanent order of cognitional structure, such that the elements of this order are known to be truly good. The attempt to question or deny that we can definitely identify them as such, only provides further evidence that we are consciously aware of them as values. Therefore, the proportionalist espousal of a metaethical calculus to determine the goodness or badness of individual acts, insofar as this throws the value of the elements of immanent order into question, is counterpositional: it only serves

28 Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1877).

Moral Conversion and Problems in Proportionalism

163

to manifest the conscious commitment of the proportionalist to these goods as such. The analysis offered here may serve to reflect further on one of the most compelling criticisms of proportionalism that has been offered in recent years: that it fails to come up with a way of commensurating the basic goods, such as truth, moral goodness, friendship, life etc., which it acknowledges as basic.29 In cognitional terms we can reflect that what is expressed as the “incommensurability” of basic goods is what we are aware of in the process of arriving at the value judgments concerning the true value of the constitutive elements of the immanent order of cognitional structure. We may talk of “marshalling and weighing the evidence” as operations consciously engaged in as part of the attempt to reach judgments, both of fact and of value. Now, our paradigm instance of a judgment of value, discussed above, is a judgment arrived at in reversing the proportionalist counterposition that acts are only good or bad in terms of a calculus of consequences. This judgment is falsified by the counterexample given in the conscious finality of the one who puts forward the proportionalist argument: the awareness that it is truly good, irrespective of consequences, to accept a true moral theory as true and act accordingly. And on the basis of the data provided by this experience one may make the judgment of value concerning the immanent order of cognitional structure. Since we arrived at this judgment in this way we can see that “weighing the evidence” was precisely not “weighing” in any proportionalist terms. What has occurred is, rather, that we grasp that the conditions for this being a true judgment of value are given in consciousness: there are no further relevant questions to ask as to whether this is truly a value or not. It is this spontaneous anticipation of relevance, of questions as relevant or irrelevant to settling whether x is a true value or not, which is, I suggest, our awareness of “incommensurability.” We simply grasp that questions of the long-term effects of our accepting moral theory x or y as true are irrelevant to judging that the immanent order of cognitional structure is a true value. This is because we are aware that the value of truth, of accepting a true value as true, is basic; or, again, that the good of acting in accord with a moral theory as true is, incontestably, a good. Such awareness of “incommensurability,” that certain things just do not “add up” is, of course,

29 See the antiproportionalist works mentioned in footnote 2 in this chapter; also, Jean Porter, The Recovery of Virtue: The Relevance of Aquinas for Christian Ethics (London: SPCK, 1994), p. 21; also, Daniel M. Hausman (July 1995), “The Impossibility of Interpersonal Utility Comparisons,” Mind, 104: 473–490.

164

Insight and Analysis

implicit in our weighing of evidence in coming to make judgments of fact. If someone tells me that I cannot make the judgment that “I make judgments” because I have not yet taken into account the batting averages of Australian cricketers, I am hardly to take this seriously. For I have a capacity, spontaneously exercised, to realize what is and what is not relevant in the reasonable weighing of evidence prior to judgment. In Insight Lonergan suggests that various types of counterposition in epistemology will have their extension into both metaphysics and ethics.30 It is not surprising, therefore, that proportionalism bears a family resemblance to some epistemological counterpositions. I would suggest that one counterpart is the type of idealist relativism Lonergan criticizes in chapter 9.31 This form of relativism espouses the view that “truth is in the whole,” or a “coherence” rather than “correspondence” view of truth, such that the absolute of truth cannot be reached short of complete knowledge of the whole universe. As Lonergan puts it, “For him nothing is simply true, for that is possible only when comprehensive coherence is reached; for him, nothing is simply wrong, for every statement involves some understanding and so some part of what he names truth.”32 I do not think it would be invidious to suggest that one could apply this description to the proportionalist, substituting “morally true” and “morally wrong” for their epistemological counterparts. For the proportionalist holds that any particular act is definitively determined as to its goodness or badness when all consequences of the act, scattered across time and space, are known. Clearly, the proportionalist can only recommend some kind of probable evaluation as to what is a good or bad act, here and now. One of the major criticisms of proportionalism in the literature concerns the rationality of this “probable” estimation of the moral quality of individual acts; and, as will be seen below,

30 Insight, pp. 602–603. 31 Insight, pp. 342–347. 32 Insight, p. 347. I believe the analysis offered here also supports the criticism of proportionalism offered by Martin Rhonheimer, who argues that it fails to do justice to the intentional “informing” of, what he terms, “intentionally basic human acts.” Rhonheimer attacks the proportionalist’s claim to effect indefinite expansion of the intentional meaning and value of particular human acts in terms of the overall foreseen outcomes of those acts (See Martin Rhonheimer (April 1995), “A Reply to Richard McCormick,” The Thomist, 59: 279–311). In the paradigm instance of one’s cognitive and evaluative intentional acts considered here, it is clearly counterpositional to argue against either the view that such acts have definite form or that the exigencies they involve have a definite value, entailing certain absolute obligations. Such argument would only serve to manifest the obligation to be reasonable and responsible whatever the consequence.

Moral Conversion and Problems in Proportionalism

165

difficulties for proportionalism here become compounded when we consider its intuitionist foundations. But, just as the “idealist relativist” becomes involved in incoherence when through his particular judgments he claims to know that no particular judgments, short of a grasp of the whole truth, are true, so the proportionalist is confronted with the self-referential charge we made above concerning his explicit denial of what he is implicitly committed to in argument: the value of truth, and the immanent order by which human persons arrive at that truth, true values known to be so without knowledge of the rest of the universe and its future unfolding, values which I know I ought to choose under pain of being inconsistent and, thus, immoral. Somewhat different from idealist relativism, is the “popular scientific relativism” which Lonergan also criticizes, almost in passing, in chapter 9 of Insight.33 It is this form of relativism, however, which has become fashionable in some quarters in philosophy of science over the last 30 years or so. So, in response to the fallibilism of Popper and Lakatos, philosophers such as Feyerabend, Laudan, and the later Putnam have challenged the claim that science, in some way, progresses toward truth. If we are always on the way to truth, but there are no definite instances in which we know we have attained it, as the fallibilists assert, how do we know that there is anything like “truth” to which our investigations aspire? Overcoming this impasse is a matter of adverting, on the one hand, to the fact that the fallibilist position involves truth claims, judgments of truth as to the nature of scientific investigation and the cognitive limitations to which human beings are subject, and, on the other, to the fact that the relativist opponents of fallibilism are no less involved in making judgments claiming to be true in the activity of putting forth their counterarguments.34 There is a similarity, I believe, between the fallibilist “intuitive” positing of truth as the goal of scientific advance and the intuitionism implicit in proportionalism regarding “basic goods.” It has been argued that, given its failure to commensurate the incommensurable in some reasonable way, proportionalism ends up in intuitionism—in the end we choose to subordinate this basic good to that by fiat. But this may not be so surprising when we consider that proportionalism is intuitionist in inception. Perhaps one of the most elegantly argued forms of ethical intuitionism is to be found

33 Insight, p. 336. 34 On the self-destructive nature of some of the positions espoused by Karl Popper see Hugo Meynell (1982), “Infallible Fallibilism,” New Blackfriars, 63: 333–343; on similar problems in the fallibilism of Donald Davidson see my article “Davidson and Lonergan on Skepticism and Truth,” Journal for the British Society of Phenomenology, Autumn 1995.

166

Insight and Analysis

in the second part of Sir David Ross’, nonproportionalist, work The Right and the Good.35 Ross invites us to reach the appropriate intuitions of what are the basic goods through various thought experiments. Now, while I would not deny the persuasive power of many of Ross’s examples, I think it is open to one to challenge reasonably what the intuitionist holds out to be basic goods in the same way that the relativist philosopher of science denies, or throws into question, the proposition that science has anything to do with truth. Just as it is open to Putnam, Feyerabend, and Laudan to deny fallibilist intuitions, so it is open to the skeptic to throw into doubt proportionalist intuitions as to the “abstract” basic goods which provide the measure against which we calculate the probable goodness or badness of this or that concrete act. These Platonic yardsticks, indefinitely beyond our reach, may simply be brushed aside as utopian chimera. The skeptic’s question to proportionalist intuitionism is, “How do you know that these are basic goods, rather than other things, such as turning around five times on Tuesdays?” And, of course, one can come up with more plausible, yet sinister alternatives, such as torturing others for amusement. The crucial point is that, it is precisely through the kind of self-referential moves deployed above against proportionalism that one can mount a nonintuitionistic defense of basic goods. For, as argued above, one cannot argue against the position on the value of the immanent order of cognitional structure without implicitly admitting the finality of that order as that which ought to be followed, that which ought to be chosen. But the rub here, insofar as proportionalism is involved, is that such basic goods or values as established are so because one understands that this particular set of acts, the acts of admitting a moral theory as correct, or as false, and choosing to act accordingly are acts which are known as determinately obligatory. It is in this context that one can understand the import of Lonergan’s contention that “. . . the good is never an abstraction. Always it is concrete.”36 For, the good of the immanent order of the self and its operations is a concrete, ethical praxis, not an abstraction in a possible world. Therefore, just as the epistemological skeptic is not at odds with the abstract possibility of “human knowing,” but with the fact of knowing demonstrated in his own performance, so also, are those who deny the value of their conscious activities at odds with concrete fact. The proportionalist also, then, is at odds with the concrete, factual value of his own cognitional activity when he suggests that there is no particular act which we can know to be

35 Sir David Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930). 36 “Healing and Creating in History,” Third Collection, p. 104.

Moral Conversion and Problems in Proportionalism

167

definitively determined as to its goodness, such that its execution is obligatory (irrespective of future consequences). For, as we have argued, he implicitly demands complicity in accepting his theory as true and as that which is to inform moral choosing. And that is to demand, as morally required, certain concrete acts. To meet the reasoned arguments of those who claim different intuitions of basic goods, then, one needs to show the de facto commitment of one’s interlocutors to these goods as basic. But this is achieved insofar as one shows that this or that particular act, of acceding to truth and so forth, is truly good and morally obligatory. It is by doing this that one shows proportionalist metaethics to be incoherent. It is indeed ironic, then, that, as we shall argue further below, far from being “abstract” it is absolute ethical norms which are, when properly understood, entirely concrete, whereas proportionalism as intuitionistic is open to the charge of postulating dogmatic abstractions as moral ideals. It is only through arguments which entail the very reversal of proportionalism itself that one can hope to ground ethical values against the charge of being just someone else’s abstract intuitions. The various presentations of proportionalist calculation need not detain us here, since I do not see presentation or representation as modifying the basic strategy which I have argued to be incoherent. As for those who argue for some kind of “mixed economy” between proportionalism and nonproportionalist ethics I think, in fairness, the onus is on the proponents of such an economy to show how the adoption of a theory which is fundamentally flawed can be helpful. It is not in question that the vast majority of our judgments about fact are ever at best probable and tentative, and such judgments enter into our moral reflections. Judgments of value themselves may only be probable. Most of our evaluative considerations concern, what Lonergan terms, “orders” and myriad are the instances of probable judgments concerning the efficiency, the need for improvement or abandonment of these orders. Indeed, we make comparative judgments about such orders: it is better to do x rather than y, if by choosing x more people are fed or receive education, than by choosing y. But such orders are of value insofar as they serve the value of the originating values who are persons. Here comparative judgments are irrelevant. For, given that similars are understood similarly, the exigencies for truth, value, and moral action which should be met in the instance of immanent order that I happen to be, should also be met in other significantly similar instances of originating value, which are other persons. The onus is on the proportionalist to show how a theory which is fundamentally incoherent can illuminate and assist in “vague” areas or areas of difficulty. Clearly, that some moral choice is difficult does not alter its obligatory nature. For, in the light of the arguments above, even the editor of the

168

Insight and Analysis

“Jeremy Bentham Journal” is under a moral obligation to reject a false moral theory and accept a true one, with the commitment to inform his activity accordingly, even if this is at some personal cost. Once the central strategy of proportionalist theory is given up as incoherent, in what sense can the theory retain any determinate identity? What, then, of absolute norms? Clearly, there is an absolute requirement for me to meet the exigencies of the immanent order that I am, if I am to be good, to be authentic. But there are conditions of possibility for the functioning and exercise of these exigencies such that to destroy and damage elements within the schemes of recurrence which condition the immanent order of the person is to attack that order itself. This is the point of Lonergan’s remarks in Insight: “If the terminal objects [of choice] are to be consistent, then there is no room for choosing the part and repudiating the whole, for choosing the conditioned and repudiating the condition, for choosing the antecedent and repudiating the consequent.”37 Mention of “parts and wholes” and “conditioned and conditioning” here draws our attention to the way Lonergan’s analysis of world order includes different types of intelligible interrelation between elements. The vertical and horizontal finalities identified in the paradigm instance of cognitional structure may, through empirical investigation, also be found to characterize the orders extending through time and space which are the context for the functioning of that order. Within world order, on this view, elements may function in a participative and/or instrumental way. Without going into the details of this, one can observe that, as Mark Frisby points out, Lonergan’s approach diverges from Kant.38 The basic goods of, for example, life, knowledge,

37 Insight, p. 602. 38 “Mission and the Spirit,” Third Collection, p. 24; Frisby, “Lonergan’s Method in Ethics,” note 20, pp. 254–255. The analysis offered here would suggest that Lonergan’s basic approach in ethics leads in directions somewhat different from those followed by some contemporary moral theologians influenced by “Transcendental Thomism.” So, James F. Keenan writes that for Josef Fuchs there is only one moral absolute: “to do right and avoid evil” (“Josef Fuchs at eighty: defending conscience from Rome,” Theology Digest, Vol. 42, 1995, 137–140, p. 139). But to validate this precept in the concrete context of self-affirmation is at once to covalidate more than one moral absolute. To begin with, it is to validate the absolute requirement that I acknowledge a true precept as true, whatever the consequences; that, further, I am absolutely required to conform my doing to my moral knowing; the immanent order of cognitional and moral consciousness of each individual must not be willingly destroyed, damaged, and so forth. And moving on from this affirmation, following through on Lonergan’s point that one cannot consistently will the part without willing the whole by which it is conditioned, one develops a number of absolute requirements protecting and fostering the unrestricted development of persons in community. It is also instructive

Moral Conversion and Problems in Proportionalism

169

friendship, and moral goodness, are not mere instruments for the exercise of freedom on the part of a transcendental ego. Rather, a generalized empirical method invites us to investigate further the order within which the immanent order of the self and its exigencies for authentic self-transcendence can and does function. I can either use a car or a bus to get to work; one instrument can be substituted for another. But I do not, in the present world order, use my capacity for factual truth as a mere instrument on the way to attaining moral truth, for which I could substitute some alternative. The same is true of other basic goods such as friendship. Without some kind of communal action one is not born. Reflection on a story like that of Helen Keller’s demonstrates the profound dependence upon other persons of even our capacity to function intellectually and morally. By characterizing the immanent norms of self-authenticity, and the conditions of world order necessary for the functioning of those norms as absolute, reference is being made precisely to this world order and to some of the widest and most general features of that order discovered to be of relevance to moral development. By talking of moral absolutes one is going beyond what is morally required in any possible world, or what is required for the moral perfection of angelic beings. One is referring beyond these, to goods in the human world which must not be destroyed or damaged by rational agents under pain of those agents acting in an incoherent manner. Such absolute requirements which are, or follow from, the exigencies of immanent personal order, are transcultural; for their absence would be the absence of what we could in any intelligible way describe as “the human”: “. . . the transcendentals are . . . invariant over cultural change.”39

3. The Question of Contraception The implications of Lonergan’s analyses of statistically emergent process for ethics and moral theology require considerable further investigation.

to compare the differences between Lonergan’s remarks on “fundamental option” with those of Rahner-inspired theologians (see “Lonergan Responds” in Foundations of Theology, P. Mcshane (ed.) (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1971), p. 226). I think such differences reflect neo-Kantian attitudes to cognition and consciousness on the part of such theologians, attitudes which Lonergan repudiates (see Joseph Boyle Jr.’s examination of some of these positions, “Freedom, the Human Person, and Human Action,” in Principles of Catholic Moral Life, William May (ed.) (Chicago, IL: Franciscan Herald Press, 1980), 237–266). 39 Method, p. 11.

170

Insight and Analysis

However, it is difficult at the present stage of research to discern quite what these implications would be.40 In unpublished remarks made at the time of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae Lonergan expressed doubts about the validity of the position that contraception is immoral.41 His view was that there is, indeed, an “objective ordination” between coition and conception42 but that, since the relation between coition and conception is statistical, both natural and artificial methods of birth prevention can be morally licit. I have sometimes read arguments to the effect that contraception is no more immoral than is shaving. This might be thought to comport with the views Lonergan expresses in his (formerly) private letter. The idea of a number of moral theologians in the late 1960s was that one might retain procreation as a fundamental moral end of marriage while allowing the regulation of births either by NFP or by contraception. Lonergan seems to subscribe to this position in his letter and draws upon the moral insights expressed in his earlier, published article, “Finality, Love and Marriage” in arguing that the statistical relation obtaining between coition and conception permits contraception as a moral option. However, the shaving analogy is, in fact, completely at variance with the moral insights expressed in Lonergan’s published essay. That essay proposes: (a) that procreation, the coming to be of new human persons, is a true good, and (b) there is an “objective ordination” of sexual intercourse toward that good, that end. If all those capable of growing beards decided that from tomorrow onward they would remain clean-shaven there could be no moral objection to that decision. But the upshot of Lonergan’s view on procreation and marriage is that there is an ought inscribed in the “objective ordination” of sexual intercourse to the end of the coming to be of human persons. The view, many have in fact adopted, that “marriage” can be chosen as something quite unconnected with the coming to be of other persons through intercourse is at variance with the position of “Finality, Love and Marriage”

40 For a beginning, see Kenneth Melchin’s works mentioned above: Cynthia Crysdale also indicates the need for further investigation here, in her “Revisioning Natural Law,” Theological Studies, 56, 1995, 464–484. 41 Now available in the form of a letter published in The Lonergan Studies Newsletter 11, 1990, 7–8. Given the very negative tone of his remarks on the U.S. contraceptives industry in his 1942 review of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s On Marriage one may conclude that Lonergan’s view had not always been that expressed in the private letter dating from the late 1960s. See, Lonergan, Shorter Papers: CWL, Vol. 20, R.C. Croken, R.M. Doran, and H.D. Monsour (eds.) (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2007), p. 154. 42 See, “Finality, Love and Marriage,” Collection, 46 n. 73.

Moral Conversion and Problems in Proportionalism

171

and with the “middle” position many theologians adopted at the time of Humanae Vitae, Lonergan included. On the other hand, given that the moral insights (a) and (b) are defended by Lonergan, is an intentionality analysis of the choice to contracept really in accord with those moral goods? I think not. Questions arise in this regard precisely on the basis of Lonergan’s paradigm instance of known finality to the good: conscious intentional process. Given that the relation between question and answer, truth-seeking and truth-finding is only statistical, the question of how this consideration enters into our moral choosing must arise. Is it not open to the inauthentic drifter to use the “statistical relation” in question as a rationalizing alibi in his flight from insight into morally crucial matters concerning self and others? St. Thomas notes that reason may reasonably decide to cease its activities in sleep (so showing his own awareness of such questions for moral thought).43 What is required, then, is an intentionality analysis determining both moral and immoral cases of choice. Why are some types of choice to cease the active pursuit of truth by, say, going to sleep contrary to the value of truth and why are others in accord with it? Why are some types of choice to avoid the coming to be of a person in accord with the value of life, while others are not? While Lonergan is eloquent on the recurrent cycles constitutive of the dynamism of human being, he does not provide the kind of intentionality analysis that would illuminate these questions, although the thrust of his approach does, I believe, point in the direction of such analysis. A careful and, I think, accurate intentionality analysis, highlighting the differences between natural and artificial birth control has been sketched out by John Finnis, Germain Grisez, and Joseph Boyle.44 This is not an isolated issue. As Michael Stebbins remarks,45 Lonergan left much to be done in differentiating the “fourth level” of responsibility, and among the activities characteristic of this “level” are choices. In short, Lonergan’s remarks on contraception appear to remain within the context of a discussion centered upon faculty/ “frustrated faculty” distinctions—a nest of terms his own work points us beyond.

4. The Theological Perspective It has been argued that the consistent application of proportionalist metaethics would alter the moral principle of double-effect. Bartholomew

43 Summa theologica la 2ae, 34, 1. 44 “‘Every Marital Act Ought to Be Open to New Life’: Toward a Clearer Understanding,” The Thomist, Vol. 52, 1988, 369–390. 45 See Afterword in Stebbins, below.

172

Insight and Analysis

Kiely, among others, points out that the determination of good or bad choices in terms of aggregates of good or bad effects implies a move away from the distinction between the intelligible degrees of personal responsibility involved in choice, which is made in applications of the double-effect principle to moral situations.46 Central to the principle is the moral demand that I do not do evil so that good may come; but according to any consistent proportionalism this moral view should be abandoned if the maximizing of good effects is what one foresees may be achieved by abandoning it. There has also been debate over the way versions of the principle in classical moral theology sometimes suggested a proportionalist evaluation of foreseen, but “not intended,” side-effects as part of the overall morality of some choices. Finnis, Grisez, and Boyle have argued that, if the language of classical moral theologians was sometimes vague in this area, Aquinas’ position, as expressed in his discussion of legitimate self-defense, was clear: the “proportion” involved in a morally legitimate choice of self-defense (involving perhaps the death of the other party), is not a mathematical tally of good or bad side-effects, but the “proportion” of force required to bring about the defense of life.47 By way of an addendum to my discussion above I would like to turn briefly to the principle of double-effect as this occurs in Lonergan’s theological work. One can observe how, in following and attempting to develop Aquinas’ thought on human freedom, divine predestination and salvation, Lonergan’s theology shows a commitment to the intelligible distinctions concerning choice and responsibility which the principle of double-effect attempts to express. Further, his discussion serves to draw our attention to some interesting nuances in St. Thomas’ presentation of “double-effect” in his treatment of the mysteries of divine salvific choice. In Grace and Freedom, Insight, and De Verbo Incarnato, we see Lonergan following the Thomist view that God does not will evil so that good may come. The Father does not vindictively will the torture and death of His Son in order to save us. Rather it is the love and absolute fidelity of His Son that He wills, knowing infallibly that in this world order of sin and evil, this will lead to the torture and death of the Son, and from this evil God will bring good about.48 That the intelligible distinction in choice between evil

46 Kiely, “The Impracticality of Proportionalism,” pp. 666–669. 47 See Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus, Vol. 1, pp. 308–309. 48 De Verbo Incarnato (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1964), 455–456. One may also add to these the reflections Lonergan provided his students in his course on Grace, De ente supernaturali, given in Montreal in the 1940s. See J. Michael

Moral Conversion and Problems in Proportionalism

173

which I am always forbidden to do and bad side-effects which I may bring about, is in no way incidental to Lonergan’s theological corpus can been seen from the place such a distinction has in his attempted solution to the impasse of the Báñez/Molina controversy over free will and divine predestination. Part of the solution, Lonergan believes is to return to Aquinas’ view that: “Besides the being that God causes, and the nonbeing that God does not cause, there is the irrational that God neither causes nor does not cause but permits others to perpetrate.”49 Lonergan follows the Christian tradition which holds that Our Father in heaven does not do evil that good may come. He does not directly will the torture and death of His Son because of the “weight” of all the good consequences that flow from such an act. According to that tradition it is unacceptable to hold that, say, the Father would statistically “stack the dice” against Judas so that his life could be “used” for the salvation of countless numbers. On a proportionalist view one could, presumably, argue that Judas’ eternal damnation could be a directly willed good insofar as the good consequences of the salvation of numberless persons, resulting from his betrayal of Christ, outweighed the evil. In the course of his discussion of the Báñez/Molina controversy Lonergan draws attention to St. Thomas’ remarks in the Summa concerning the mystery of God’s free choice of a world order that includes both salvation and damnation.50 I think careful examination of such passages might prove illuminating for a discussion of double-effect. For one thing, attempting to wrestle with this question from the perspective of the mystery of divine choice helps to remove the ambiguities that can enter talk of double-effect in terms of how probable or improbable “foreseen” side-effects appear to the moral agent. It is clear in the case of the divine will that vagueness in this regard is not at issue, and that what we mean by “direct willing” and “willing to allow” are ways of trying to express intelligible distinctions operative in some types of moral choice—differences in intentionality. In his treatment of why God creates a world order of this kind, St. Thomas points out that, just as in the natural world, so in the human, privation and “evil” are permitted lest “many goods be hindered.” He goes on to say that the reason for God’s choice is simply the divine will and, thereby, indicates

Stebbins, The Divine Initiative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), pp. 274–278. 49 Insight, pp. 667–668. 50 Grace and Freedom, J. Patout Burns (ed.) (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1971), p. 110.

174

Insight and Analysis

that we are in the realm of mystery here. But he does make the further point that, although God’s choice is shrouded in mystery we can say that this choice, of a world including salvation and reprobation, does not offend against justice and fairness. Why does he choose some to glory while others he rejects? His sole willing is the ground . . . we cannot complain of unfairness if God prepares unequal lots for equals. This would be repugnant to justice as such were the effect of predestination a due to be rendered, not a favour. He who grants by grace can give freely as he wills, be it more be it less, without prejudice to justice, provided he deprives no one of what is owing.51

What is of significance about St. Thomas’ position for understanding the principle of double-effects is, first, that there is no proportionalist “numbers game” being played. Clearly, God is in the optimum position for evaluating consequences but that, for St. Thomas, is not relevant. There is mention of “many goods” being hindered if God were not to choose to allow evil and privation; presumably the good of genuine human freedom and love are among such. But there is no suggestion that God definitively knows that such goods “outweigh” evils according to some definitive divine calculus. What is more to the point, and what in fact indicates that “numbers games” are an irrelevance, is that St. Thomas argues that the “foreseen,” permitted, side-effects of some free creatures choosing evil and reprobation would render the divine mysterious choice of this world order unintelligible, immoral (thus impossible for God) were it to violate the principles of justice and fairness. And it is clear, from the direction of St. Thomas’ remarks that the unfair denial of what is due, even to one person, would not be rendered fair simply by heaping up satisfied persons on the other side of the scales.52 For St. Thomas, Lonergan, and others in the tradition, including Kant, the person as an instance of originating value, has a right and a duty to develop

51 Summa theologica, I, q. 23, a. 5, ad 3m. 52 One can note that St. Thomas’ position here appears to support the analysis of double-effect and the moral permissibility of foreseen side-effects offered by Grisez, Finnis, and Boyle. Their contention is that one’s responsibility for sideeffects is such that were such effects anticipated as violating some mode of responsibility toward the basic goods then the proposed action is forbidden. One should not, then, choose an action the side-effects of which would violate principles of justice and fairness. See Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus, Vol. 1, p. 307; Joseph M. Boyle Jr. (1980), “Toward Understanding the Principle of Double Effect,” Ethics, 90: 527–538.

Moral Conversion and Problems in Proportionalism

175

authentically. The source of this value and intelligibility, God, does not use persons as things or means, and does not deny them what He has given them as their right.

5. Conclusion In his influential The Theory of Morality Alan Donagan relates the story of his own conversion from consequentialism: he and another proportionalist were debating the position to be taken over the morality of a particular course of action, when it struck Donagan that there was no scientific way of settling the issue over the consequences of the act in the way they were attempting to do. Their performance appeared comic.53 Donagan’s description of his conversion could perhaps be taken as an illustration of the intriguing intellectual phenomenon Lonergan names “inverse insight.” One is pushing hard in a certain direction to understand an issue when one realizes that the matter is not to be approached in that way at all—and this realization, this inverse insight, can cause considerable surprise. Perhaps the discovery by Donagan, and others, that proportionalist metaethics does not finally “add up” is analogous to the inverse insights enjoyed by Cantor and Gödel in mathematical logic and by Einstein and Heisenberg in science. But in the area of morality, unlike mathematics and science there is, perhaps, more of the intimately personal at stake. Moral conversion is ongoing and demands a consistent extirpation of my biases, blindness, sins, and the moral theories which I may have taken on board in a more or a less thought-through manner in order to rationalize and explain my darkness as light. In this chapter, I have attempted to show that the theme of moral conversion, of the need for a transformation of the responses of the heart, of Lonergan’s Method, and later work, complement, and, indeed, require the analyses of ethical foundations in the earlier work Insight. For religious, moral, and intellectual conversions are neither static achievements nor are they isolated one from another. If a moral conversion of heart and mind is to be genuine it must be ongoing; if it is to be both genuine and ongoing it has to be open to ever further questions for the responsible person as to what that person should do. If that conversion, then, is to have a hope of taking root in persons it must, at least, have at its disposal ways of confronting and critically assessing the many moral theories and worldviews by

53 Alan Donagan, The Theory of Morality, p. 204.

176

Insight and Analysis

which human beings have justified their actions. The method in ethics of Insight is certainly one of the elements required if such an encounter is to produce fruit. Following Lonergan’s approach in Insight this critical encounter will discover both authentic and coherent and inauthentic and incoherent moral viewpoints, views which may play their role in immoral rationalization: one such view, I have argued, is proportionalism.

Part 5 Philosophy and Theology

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 8

Christianity, “INTERCULTURALITY,” and Salvation: Some Perspectives from Lonergan The 1998 Synod of Asian Bishops in Rome helped to focus attention in a very concrete way upon theological issues surrounding notions such as “evangelization” and “inculturation,” and the interplay between the mission of the Holy Spirit, preparing all humankind in the diversity of cultures and religions to receive the incarnate Word, and the mission of that Word himself, Christ Jesus. One of the participants at the Synod, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), was certainly no stranger to the complexity of the theological issues being raised. In 1993 he had turned his attention to the issue of Christianity and inculturation in a lecture delivered in Hong Kong entitled “Christ, Faith, and the Challenge of Cultures.”1 Some years earlier, he had offered theological reflections on questions concerning “anonymous Christianity” and allied theological issues in a paper that included a discussion of Rahner’s approach to these matters.2 In his 1993 lecture the cardinal attempts an analysis of the dynamics of evangelization and inculturation that involves a critique of a Western relativist evaluation of what such a process can and should entail. He points out that such relativism was voiced against the Christian claim to uniqueness early in the Church’s history by such Roman writers as Symmachus, and remains substantially the same objection today. Against such relativism he argues, first, that any human culture if authentic must be open to the discovery of truth—truth that may challenge and revise some of its deepseated assumptions. Secondly, philosophical relativism is in fact alien to most cultures and religious worldviews. And, thirdly, Christianity can be seen to transform and redeem other religious-cultural worldviews in the way it preaches a God now brought close, in the Incarnation—a God, or “Divinity,” often implicitly recognized in these worldviews as somehow “distant.” A further point Ratzinger makes, and one that I wish to highlight for discussion in this chapter, is that the Church, the People of God, is itself a “cultural subject.” Insofar as there is an intersubjective communion of heart and mind in the body of Christ this must be so. We cannot isolate

1 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (March 1995), “Christ, Faith, and the Challenge of Cultures,” Origins 24: 679–686. 2 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1987), pp. 161–170.

180

Insight and Analysis

the incarnate Word from the Jewish worldview and culture which he enters into, transforms, renews, “assumes,” and, in doing so, confirms. This culture of the Old Covenant is itself, as Ratzinger points out, a result of what Gadamer might term a “fusion of horizons” with other cultural elements of its neighbors, taking place over centuries. However, such an evolved cultural form receives something of a definitive confirmation from the perspective of Christian faith once and insofar as it is taken into the life and mind of Christ. This process of cultural fusion then enters a new phase, but continues in the history of the Church, in which this Jewish worldview, confirmed and renewed in Christ, encounters and transforms the cultural forces it encounters in the process of evangelization. In this way, Christianity, unlike some religions but akin to, for example, Buddhism, creates a universal Christian culture while also allowing (indeed, fostering) what in sociological terms one might call “subcultures”—that is, the varied local cultural forms of Christian societies, nations, and cultures. This phenomenon Ratzinger terms “interculturality.”3 In some ways this analysis appears to move against the current evident in much of the theological reflection on evangelization and inculturation this century. Pope Pius XI remarked to Fr. M.D. Roland-Gosselin that the object of the Church is not to “civilize” but to evangelize,4 and since the encyclical Summi Pontificatus (1939) the magisterium has often repeated the need to differentiate the two processes. This process of making an increasingly sharp theological distinction between evangelization and inculturation went forward under the impetus of historical developments. A period in which evangelization had gone hand in hand with European colonization and imperial expansion was passing away, and a new appreciation of Catholicism as a world Church was emerging. In line with such developments Bernard Lonergan insisted that we were moving away from a period of “classical culture” in which Christianity was seen as linked to a view which distinguished between, on the one hand, a normative classical culture of meanings and values and, on the other, human groupings that were not cultured but barbarian. In the final section of his work Method in Theology, entitled “Communications,” Lonergan treats of evangelization, the culmination of the Christian message: Now a classicist would feel it was perfectly legitimate for him to impose his culture on others. For he conceives culture normatively, and he conceives his

3 Ratzinger, “Christ, Faith and the Challenge of Cultures,” 681–683. 4 Quoted in Walter Abbott (ed.), The Documents of Vatican II (London: Chapman, 1967), p. 264 n. 192.

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

181

own to be the norm. Accordingly for him to preach both the gospel and his own culture, is for him to confer the double benefit of both the true religion and the true culture. In contrast, the pluralist acknowledges a multiplicity of cultural traditions. . . . Rather he would proceed from within their culture and he would seek ways and means for making it into a vehicle for communicating the Christian message.5

Is Ratzinger then proposing a return to what Lonergan would term a classicist model of evangelization? Does his analysis of the People of God as a cultural subject, such that one can indeed speak of a “Christian culture,” pit an ideology of normative culture against the pluralist view Lonergan outlines? One of my aims in this chapter is to attempt to provide an answer to this question. However, in attempting to answer the question, further issues arise regarding the import of Lonergan’s work for such notions as cultural normativity, Christianity, and inculturation. I will also, therefore, examine some of those implications. Finally, I shall extend the discussion to further matters that arise in a consideration of Christianity and mission: the claims to uniqueness on the part of Christianity and the theological cogency and desirability of theories of “anonymous Christianity.”

1. From Classical Culture to Historical Mindedness One phrase of Lonergan’s perhaps more than any other appears to have imprinted itself upon the minds of late-twentieth-century theologians in the English-speaking world: the shift from classical culture to historical mindedness. For some it has become part of an arsenal to be deployed against anything which is deemed to be “pre-conciliar,” myopic, traditionalist, a slogan with which to hail a “world come of age.” For others, who react against the former view, it can appear as yet another modernist mantra which surely fails to do justice to the complexity and diversity of the Catholic ecclesiastical tradition.6 When one takes into consideration postmodern critiques of

5 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1972), p. 363. 6 See, for example, Charles Curran’s use of the terms in C. Curran and R. Hunt, Dissent in and for the Church: Theologians and Humanae Vitae (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1969), pp. 155–169. In response, Janet E. Smith objects, quite rightly I believe, both to the imprecision to which Curran’s use of the terms “Classicism” and “historical mindedness” leads, and to the way it is a caricature of even Platonic moral theory (Janet E. Smith, Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later

182

Insight and Analysis

the “modern” (appreciating that ecclesiastical modernism was and is but a subspecies of the same), one may wonder whether this Lonerganian phrase is not a celebration of the “modern” which has now had its day. My first task in this section is, therefore, to clarify somewhat what Lonergan means by this expression. Its open-textured character, including as it does sketches of viewpoints that are actually opposed, make it ill-suited to be transformed into a slogan. One should bear in mind Lonergan’s own insistence that ideal-types, or models for facilitating historical explanation, should not be imposed on the data in such a way as to become, in H. Marrou’s words, “great anti-comprehension machines.”7 One of the principal means I will use to clarify Lonergan’s meaning is to raise and examine the question: is Aquinas a classicist for Lonergan?

1.1 Continuity and diversity in cultural change Lonergan credited the transition in his thinking from a normative, classical notion of culture to an empirical notion of cultural diversity to the reading of Christopher Dawson’s The Age of the Gods in the late 1930s, and F.E. Crowe notes the appearance of remarks on the limitations of “Classicism” in Lonergan’s writing as early as 1949.8 In works of the late 1950s and early 1960s such criticisms of classicism increase.9 Something of the open-textured nature of the term can be seen from these early uses: in the 1959 lectures on education we read that classicism “in its best sense” is to be seen in the Greek

(Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1991), pp. 180 and 397). Curran’s lack of real understanding of the implications of Lonergan’s position is manifested in, among other things, his repeated drawing of a distinction between “classicist” thinking as deductive and modern thinking as inductive. For Lonergan, the discussions of both deduction and induction of the “modern” period fail to make the transposition from “logic to method” (see Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), pp. 288 and 301). 7 Lonergan, Method in Theology, pp. 226–229. 8 Bernard Lonergan, “Insight Revisited,” in A Second Collection (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974), p. 264; F.E. Crowe, in Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Vol. 6, Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958–1964 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), pp. 154–155, n. 25. 9 See F.E. Crowe (ed.), Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Vol. 10, Topics in Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), pp. 74–78; and “Time and Meaning,” (a 1962 paper), and “The Analogy of Meaning,” (a 1963 paper), in Crowe (ed.), Collected Works, Vol. 6, pp. 94–121 and 183–212.

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

183

discovery of mind, the Greek achievement of theory. This always remains a cultural achievement, despite its limitations, an instance of true progress in Lonergan’s view.10 In the 1962 paper “Time and Meaning” we find another attribute of the classicist highlighted, an attribute not so evident in Lonergan’s later sketches: he is one who speaks in respectful and deferential tones of the “greats” of the Western intellectual tradition—Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Newton, etc.—but has little if any appreciation of what it actually means to think systematically and creatively as did these cultural giants; the classicist has little real appreciation of what Lonergan calls the theoretical differentiation of consciousness.11 In a way, this echoes a constant theme in Lonergan’s work: the authentic human act of understanding has no substitute in a mere parroting of formulae or theory little understood. A tension may be noted here: “classicism” denotes the theoretical differentiation of consciousness, the capacity that emerges in culture for systematic, theoretical reflection, but it is also used to denote cultural deference to such an achievement on the part of those who do not properly participate in it. The 1968 paper “Belief: Today’s Issue,” provides a fairly lengthy treatment of the contrast between classical and modem culture, highlighting the limitations of both. Of the limitations of classicism we read: Classicist culture was stable. It took its stand on what ought to be, and what ought to be is not refuted by what is. It legislated with an eye to the substance of things, on the unchanging essence of human living and, while it never doubted either that circumstances alter cases or that circumstances change, still it was also quite sure that essences did not change, that change affected the accidental details that were of no great account.12

Classicist culture was also essentially “ethnocentric”: it contrasted itself not with alternative cultures but with human groups which had simply to be designated “barbarian.” “By conceiving itself normatively, [it] also had to think of itself as the one and only culture for all time. But modern culture is culture on the move. It is historicist.”13 There are other examples of the indefiniteness of Lonergan’s historical ideal-type of classicism. For instance, he characterizes as “classicist” both the metaphysical theorist, who tends to abstract from the particularity of human history and individuals, and the “person for whom the rhetorician or orator

10 11 12 13

Crowe (ed.), Collected Works, Vol. 10, p. 75. Crowe (ed.), Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 121. Lonergan, Second Collection, pp. 92–93. Ibid., p. 93.

184

Insight and Analysis

of Isocrates or Cicero represents the fine flower of human culture.”14 Yet while one may be both an admirer of theoretical metaphysics and of Cicero, it is clear from a study of such periods of Western cultural history as that of Renaissance humanism that admiration for the latter can entail opposition to the former. Furthermore, Lonergan says that “a classicist would maintain that one should never depart from an accepted terminology,”15 and would therefore be opposed to authentic development of dogma (i.e., development in accord with Vincent of Lérins and Vatican I). But then he demonstrates very ably in his own work on doctrinal history16 that new terminology was accepted to express further insight into doctrine both in the patristic period, the theology of which is affected by a “tincture” of theory, and in the medieval period, whose theology exhibits a full theoretical and systematic exploration. In other words, these periods, characterized in some way as classical by Lonergan, did and could accept new theological terminology, something to which the classicist is, according to the above quotation, opposed. Finally, it is important to observe that Lonergan on occasions also identifies philosophical and theological deductivism and the quest for certainty as a characteristic of classicism. In the second place, the classicist judged modern science in the light of the Aristotelian notion of science and by that standard found it wanting, for modern science does not proceed from self-evident, necessary principles and it does not demonstrate conclusions from such principles.17

This more than anything else should make us wary of thinking that Lonergan has given us anything like an “explanatory definition” with the term “classicism.” Throughout his career it was such theological deductivism, arising from the fourteenth-century nominalist use of Aristotle, that he strove to contrast with the authentic thought and methodology of St. Thomas Aquinas. If my indications here of a certain “untidiness” to Lonergan’s notion of classicism may appear somewhat disingenuous I would simply reiterate the point that what we have in this notion is not an explanatory concept but

14 Bernard Lonergan, Philosophy of God and Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1973), p. ix. 15 Lonergan, Method in Theology, pp. 123–124. 16 See, for example, Bernard Lonergan, The Way to Nicea (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1976). 17 Lonergan, Second Collection, p. 112.

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

185

something like a Wittgensteinian nominal definition through “family resemblance.” Lonergan makes more or less this point himself when he writes, But I would like to say that the contrast I have drawn between classicist and modern is not based on some a priori typology or periodization. It is a summary of a whole set of conclusions concerning the defects of our theological inheritance and the remedies that can be brought to bear.

More importantly, he continues, If we are not just to throw out what is good in classicism and replace it with contemporary trash, then we need to take the trouble, and it is enormous, to grasp the strength and the weakness, the power and the limitations, the good points and the shortcomings of both classicism and modernity.18

If we now address the question “is Aquinas a classicist?” we will gain a better understanding of what Lonergan considers are the strengths of the past that we need to import into the present.

1.2 Is Aquinas a classicist? In Method in Theology and elsewhere Lonergan sketches an account of the evolutionary development of the history of meaning in Western culture in terms of three stages or plateaus of achievement.19 In the first stage we witness ordinary or commonsense meaning (the plateau of “undifferentiated consciousness”). The second stage, growing out of the first, is signaled by the Greek discovery of mind; it is the period of theoretical consciousness, and in terms of Christianity Lonergan sees evidence of a “tincture” of such theory in the Christological debates of the first millennium, while a full engagement with theory is evident in the Scholastic period. The third stage grows out of the second. It is marked by the growing autonomy of the sciences, both physical and, later, human, from philosophy and the various philosophical responses to these developments, ranging from the “turn to the subject” in Descartes, Kant, and Idealism to the repudiation of such a move in positivism or linguistic analysis. While this is a general sketch of the ongoing differentiations of consciousness in the West, the models available

18 Ibid., p. 98. 19 Lonergan, Method in Theology, pp. 85–99; see also Bernard Lonergan, A Third Collection (London: Chapman, 1985), pp. 179–182.

186

Insight and Analysis

for the cultural interpreter of the process increase as one approximates to concrete examples of historical processes, since one may also take into account some 36 possible combinations of these conscious differentiations.20 It is clear from this general historical scheme both that the second stage or plateau is, for Lonergan, the stage of classicism and that it is the stage in which, historically, Aquinas is to be located. It would appear to follow, therefore, that Aquinas is a classicist. However, it is clear that Lonergan is reluctant to apply the term to St. Thomas. Rather, it is through a retrieval of Aquinas’ thought that one overcomes the limitations of classicism. This is a constant theme throughout Lonergan’s work, exemplified by the motto he took for his endeavors from Pope Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris: “novae vetere ex augere et perficere.” From the beginning of his published work Lonergan’s hermeneutic of suspicion is directed against Scotist naive realism in epistemology and its deductivist companion in theology. This conceptualism had entered through Suarezianism into the Jesuit intellectual tradition into which Lonergan was initiated in his youth. It was a breaking free from this background, being enabled to think through the challenges of historically minded modernity for Catholic thought, that characterized Lonergan’s years spent “reaching up to the mind of Aquinas.” In such papers such as the “Future of Thomism,”21 “Aquinas Today: Tradition and Innovation,” and “Fundamental Theology”22 Lonergan continues to affirm his assessment of Aquinas as the theologian of the tradition, more than any other, whose fundamental theological and philosophical approach is that which we must appropriate in order to move forward. Although Aquinas did not explicitly move from a cognitional theory and an epistemology to ground a metaphysics based upon them, Lonergan believes that both he and Aristotle before him pointed in that direction. For, on Lonergan’s view, we find in their work, implicitly and obscurely, some combination of a “phenomenology of the subject” with a “psychology of the soul.”23 It is only through an encounter with Aquinas that Lonergan is able to deconstruct the “knowing as looking” myth that has bedeviled Western

20 In addition to the three differentiations of commonsense, theory, and interiority (or the turn to the subject, of stage three), there are such differentiations as, for example, the religious, artistic, and scholarly. See Lonergan, Method in Theology, pp. 272, 275. 21 Lonergan, Second Collection, pp. 43–53. 22 Lonergan, Third Collection, pp. 35–54; Bernard Lonergan (1998), “Fundamental Theology,” Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 16: 5–24, see 22–23. 23 Bernard Lonergan, “Introduction,” in David E. Burrell (ed.), Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967).

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

187

philosophy since the late Middle Ages, and in its place outline a critical realism—a realism that holds that reality is not known through sensation but through the deployment of intelligent and reasonable operations. Further, from Aquinas we learn a totally different approach to theology from that found in fourteenth-century nominalism and deductivism. One understands theology as some attempt at a fruitful understanding of revealed truths, not an exercise in logic that strives for “scientific certainty.” The irony here is, of course, that such a notion of “science” itself becomes replaced, after a long historical process, with the very notion of a good theory as that which is the best possible in the circumstances, the attitude to theory which St. Thomas himself had with regard to theology. Thus, one of the characteristics of classicism we noted above, its ideal of logical deductivism in theology and science, is replaced by a return to St. Thomas. As Lonergan writes, contrasting the limitations of “classical Thomism” with the authentic mind of St. Thomas (and suggesting transpositions required to achieve the retrieval of that authentic voice): You may ask, however, whether after the introduction of the . . . transpositions just outlined there would be anything left of Thomism. And at once I must grant that the five emphases I attributed to classical Thomism would disappear. One may doubt, however, whether such emphases are essential to the thought of St. Thomas or of the great Thomists.24

Certainly there are transpositions to be made from Aquinas’ thought to a contemporary theology and one must note the limitations of St. Thomas’ horizon. One can surely say that Aquinas simply does not have the same sense of historical movement, of the ongoing genesis of methods and cognitive disciplines that we experience in contemporary culture. This is what Lonergan sees as a limitation in his thought. But even here we need to handle the word “limitation” carefully. Naturally, one does not “blame” a thinker of 700 years ago for not answering the questions that arise for us today; they simply did not arise for him. However, even here Lonergan’s retrieval of Aquinas leads us to qualify this admission. While Aquinas’ reflections on doctrinal development or the historicality of human thought are not conspicuous, the indications of an awareness of issues at stake are there. So when Lonergan insists that there is only one eternal truth, in God, and that human truth is both genuine truth but historically conditioned in its formulation (so that one may discern a genuine history of truth), that “concepts

24 Lonergan, Second Collection, p. 52.

188

Insight and Analysis

have dates,” in other words, he is simply exploiting and developing insights he discovered in Aquinas. Thus, Lonergan draws attention to St. Thomas’ point in the Summa contra Gentiles that human insights and judgments, even in metaphysics, have some temporal reference, given the nature of human knowing.25 Further, he draws attention to St. Thomas’ point (following Aristotle) that human knowledge and understanding only occur in an ongoing, historical process of collaboration.26 However, Scotist nominalism blocks such attention to the historicity of human thought through its account of “unconscious” concept formation, and diverts attention away from concrete historical process. Unlike St. Thomas, who was concerned to understand something of the mystery of that historical event, the Incarnation, with its implications for the real world of history, the nominalist diverts our attention away from concrete historical process to speculation concerning logical possible worlds.27 While St. Thomas could not possibly anticipate in a fulsome way the massive development of the Geisteswissenschaften in the last three centuries, still Lonergan detects heuristic anticipations of the important issues. Thus the methodological attempt to gather the authoritative texts of the tradition in the medieval period anticipates modern efforts in research and interpretation.28 And the attempts of modern historical scholarship to understand the commonsense of other cultures and times are obscurely anticipated in Aquinas’ examination of human commonsense understanding in his analysis of prudentia.29 There are achievements in Aquinas’ theology—with respect to grace, the Trinity, and other issues—that Lonergan believes are “classic,” in the sense that no theologian working in these areas today or in the future can or should ignore them. But far more important are the avenues for epistemological, metaphysical, and theological research Aquinas opens up: avenues that, Lonergan believes, open up possibilities for developing positions in these areas which admit of permanence and development—allowing for the adumbration of basic philosophical positions fostering development, but restricting radical revision at the cost of self-destructive incoherence. What is really, profoundly important in Aquinas is the discovery of heuristic

25 Lonergan, Verbum, pp. 63–64 (The work originally appeared in article form between 1946 and 1949). 26 Bernard Lonergan, Understanding and Being: The Halifax Lectures on Insight, E. Morelli and M. Morelli, F.E. Crowe, R. Doran, and T. Daly (eds.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 383. 27 Lonergan, Verbum, p. 69. 28 Lonergan, Third Collection, p. 52. 29 Ibid., p. 44.

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

189

or methodological indications of what both permanence and authentic development, on the one hand, and inauthentic decline, on the other, could be in human thought and culture. This retrieval of Aquinas, which is at the core of Lonergan’s whole enterprise, implies that for Lonergan there is a history of philosophical truth just as there is a parallel history of dogmatic truth. In this respect Lonergan’s work can be fruitfully compared and contrasted with that of Alasdair MacIntyre’s retrieval of Thomism (which emphasizes its strengths as a tradition-based form of philosophical enquiry). There are important differences between these two positions,30 yet much also that is complementary. In fact, reading the former in light of the latter helps to highlight the postmodern moments in Lonergan’s thought, particularly with regard to his retrieval of a premodern thinker, Aquinas. In many ways, then, we can see Lonergan’s critique of “classicism” as a critique of “modernity.” The central role played by the premodern thought of Aquinas in this critique reveals that any understanding of Lonergan’s notion of the defects of classicism which reads this as a “modern” or modernist critique could not be more mistaken. Further, it is interesting to observe some of the striking postmodern themes in Lonergan’s work. Even in his magnum opus, Insight, a work of “pure philosophy” if ever there was one, such elements are evident. A central theme of the work is an analysis of the way human attempts to reach cognitive and moral self-transcendence in knowing the true and the good, and acting

30 Michael P. Maxwell, Jr. (1993), “A Dialectical Encounter Between MacIntyre and Lonergan on the Thomistic Understanding of Rationality,” International Philosophical Quarterly 33: 385–399; see Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990). Maxwell draws attention to MacIntyre’s denial of the validity of nineteenth and twentieth-century attempts by Thomists to answer the epistemological questions of modernity; naturally, there is a divergence from Lonergan in this crucial area. Maxwell successfully argues that (as Lonergan points out) we cannot foist such a prejudice against meeting the epistemological challenges of modernity upon Aquinas and that there are many elements of Aquinas’ thought that would allow the development of an extremely powerful critique of the deficiencies of the epistemologies of modernity. Finally, Maxwell shows that elements within MacIntyre’s version of Thomism as a form of Thomistic fallibilism (akin therefore to views such as those of Popper or Davidson) become involved in incoherence (Maxwell, “MacIntyre and Lonergan,” p. 399). I would add to Maxwell’s criticisms the point that if some are suspicious about a reading of Aquinas that imports his thought into the epistemological debates of modernity, it is appropriate to wonder, by parity of historical suspicion, about the Thomistic authenticity of an account like MacIntyre’s, which provides a metanarrative in terms of such fallibilist criteria.

190

Insight and Analysis

accordingly, are stymied by the mystery of human bias and sin. The only “solution” to this human condition is the divine one of salvation. Thus, a philosophical enquiry into human understanding inevitably heads toward a faith perspective. “Objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity,” and that authenticity only comes about through the divine initiative healing the broken human community. This is parallel to MacIntyre’s insistence that genealogical and deconstructive critiques have unmasked the pretended impartial objectivity of the Enlightenment as flawed and, in reality, far more scattered and fragmentary in its vision of the world than its propaganda would have us believe. Without a tradition in which the virtues are cultivated, truth cannot flourish and, ultimately, that tradition must be based upon resources beyond those which a mere humanism can provide.31 More fundamentally, of course, the issue is not one of awarding marks to either Lonergan or MacIntyre on the basis of how “postmodern” they appear. The issue is, more fundamentally, one of a possible critique of postmodernity, itself very difficult to delimit, and of possible hermeneutical analyses which might even redefine movements in the Western cultural heritage in a way that challenges those genealogies espoused by some of the more noted representatives of postmodernity. For Lonergan, for example, what is at stake may well have already been played out in some way in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries; the aporias and their resolution may already be present in the dialectical relationships obtaining between Aquinas, Scotus, and Nicholas of Autrecourt. One may remark that, for all its critique of Enlightenment modernity, postmodernity cannot but be its child in the “hubristic pride” it manifests in claiming a total and revolutionary rupture from the past—a past which, in whatever circumlocutory phrases one attempts to express it, is now deemed mistaken and illusory.32 In contrast MacIntyre

31 MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, pp. 127–131. 32 Of course Derrida will claim, much to the chagrin of American partners in debate such as Rorty, that one can never “escape” the Western intellectual tradition. But it is evident that he cannot avoid making the implicit claim that at least he has struggled free enough to achieve the elbow room that allows him to “take” and “re-take” that tradition but no longer to take it “seriously”; see Jacques Derrida, “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” in Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism, (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 77–88. Derrida brings out in these remarks how fundamental the aporias and problems he encountered in Husserl remain for his thinking. In some ways, Derrida stands to Husserl as Wittgenstein II stands to Wittgenstein I regarding the failure of the “philosophical project.” Crucial to any discussion of the relationship between Lonergan and Derrida is precisely a recognition of the way Lonergan retrieves from Aquinas perspectives and approaches that were simply not “available” to Husserl. Derrida

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

191

and Lonergan are among those alone capable of a true deconstruction of the pretensions of the Enlightenment: for only a viewpoint that sees itself as an ongoing collaboration in the discovery of truth, from past to present, from present to future, can really claim to retrieve in any meaningful way what is valid in the past, or “premodern.” Before we conclude this section, examining what classicism might mean for Lonergan, it may be worth drawing attention to two further points. First, Lonergan’s hermeneutical retrieval of Aquinas, although central to his appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of the theological tradition, should not blind us to his positive evaluation of other elements in the theological tradition up to and including those evident in the nineteenth and twentieth-century Catholic tradition. Newman, for example, is a nineteenthcentury theological figure who remains very important for Lonergan. Then one finds, in an early essay on the possibility of defining the dogma of the Assumption, positive evaluation of the nondeductivist approach shown to the issue of “implicit revelation” by the theological commission that prepared the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854.33 Lonergan writes, “Out of the Augustinian, Anselmian, Thomist tradition, despite an intervening heavy overlay of conceptualism, the First Vatican Council retrieved the notion of understanding.”34 Second, given the variety of characteristics Lonergan brings under the rubric of “classicism” one may note, perhaps with some surprise, the characteristics evident in the thought of some more recent theologians which would render their work classicist. Thus, in his critique of Schoonenberg’s Christology Lonergan makes the point that the Dutch theologian’s failure to understand what Chalcedon taught on the divinity of Our Lord has to do, in part, with a “classicist” failure to appreciate the historical context of that council’s use of the term “Person” (although the meaning of the council’s teaching, Lonergan insists, is “not obscure”).35 Further, Guy Mansini has argued forcefully for the dramatic differences that exist between Lonergan and Rahner in a number of key areas of theology, one of these being the

is more aware than many another thinker of Hegel’s dictum “all negation is determinate,” but for all that, in even the most tentative or “obvious” judgment concerning a text (and Derrida is insistent on rigor in textual interpretation) one cannot avoid the exigencies of intelligence and reasonableness, nor, therefore, Lonergan would avow, one’s commitment to objective reality as the intelligible. 33 See “The Assumption and Theology,” in Collection (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1967). 34 Lonergan, Method in Theology, p. 336. 35 Lonergan, Second Collection, p. 260.

192

Insight and Analysis

crucial area of methodology.36 According to Mansini (we shall return to this issue below), from a Lonerganian perspective Rahner still appears as a theologian captive to the deductivist tradition, which places a premium on philosophical proof in theology rather than nondeductive understanding or insight regarding the divinely revealed truths—the tradition that all too readily conflates intelligibility with necessity. If this is so, then we may observe something quite ironic: Lonergan, normally considered the “philosophers’ theologian” may, in effect, place greater emphasis on the transcendence of the mysteries with regard to our understanding, than does the “theologian of mystery,” Rahner. If this is so, Rahner’s work would still be tied, in some respects, to classicist, conceptualist models from the viewpoint of Lonergan’s methodology.

2. Culture, Christianity, and Cultural Normativity Lonergan’s contrast between a classicist evangelization, which regards cultures other than the Christian West as “barbaric,” and a pluralist evangelization, which attempts to work within the possibilities of another culture recognized as an equal in terms of its communal sharing of values, should not blind us to the fact that there are in the Catholic historical tradition various forms of evangelization which do not work with the “non-barbarian (Christian) versus barbarian (non-Christian)” model. One can think of the evangelization undertaken by the Jesuits in China and India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a fairly obvious example (one which Lonergan himself acknowledged).37 Beyond this, however, analyses like those of Ratzinger begin to draw our attention to something that requires a good deal of further research and reflection. We are emerging from a period in which Christian evangelization was linked to European colonial expansion. Much of the theological reflection on evangelization in the twentieth century, including that found in the magisterium, was a taking stock of this movement beyond European hegemony. But this new phase requires its own forms of reflection: in many ways the emergence of Europe and the West as postChristian enables us to see anew the distinctions between Christianity and European culture, and between Christian mission linked to European

36 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. (1989), “Quasi-Formal Causality and ‘Change in the Other’: A Note on Karl Rahner’s Christology,” The Thomist 52: 293–306. 37 In conversation with Fr Eric O’Connor (I am unable to find the reference to this remark).

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

193

colonial expansion and Christian mission separate from it. In the context of the latter distinction, one element required for a proper understanding of evangelization is a retrieval of historical models of Christian mission prior to late medieval and Renaissance colonial expansion on the part of the West. A reflection on these earlier forms may help us move away from too rapid an identification of evangelization with the Western “imperialist” imposition of a worldview. From St. Paul’s mission in the Diaspora to the Franciscan missions to Beijing in the thirteenth century, one does not witness an “imposition” of Western culture on those to be evangelized, a mission backed by the “big battalions,” but nevertheless an unashamed call to accept and adapt to a new truth, a new worldview, and a call to make the sacrifices, sometimes great indeed, which this change of view requires. One can reflect that the Christian mission was established in India certainly by the second century, and when “Thomas Christians” prayed for the world to accept Christ they would have been praying for many a pagan area of Northern Europe.38 A further, important issue to draw attention to is the relativization of culture, and in some ways Western “classical” culture, through the emergence of Christianity itself. From the New Testament period on through the writings of the Fathers, we witness a dialectical process of reception, rejection, and transformation of that which Christianity encounters as it permeates Greco-Roman culture. Lonergan himself wrote at some length on this process in his analysis of the “Origins of Christian Realism,” and to this I shall return below. But what Ratzinger’s account of the Church as itself a cultural subject draws attention to (although it is not a feature of his lecture) is the process of relativization of culture which emerges. It emerges with particular clarity in St. Augustine, the cultured man of Western classicism, who had, before his conversion, despised the “barbarity” of mere Christianity, with its coarse and unappealing Hebrew Scriptures. According to Peter Brown, following H.I. Marrou, this relativization of classical culture went forward in Augustine’s later period in works like City of God and De Doctrina Christiana.39 The rupture with classical ideals

38 See, for example, T. Puthiakunnel, “Jewish Colonies of India Paved the Way for St. Thomas,” in J. Vellinan (ed.), The Malabar Church, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 186 (Rome, 1970), pp. 187–191. It is also important to notice the dialectical encounter already under way between Christian and Hindu thought in the writings of the early Fathers, such as Irenaeus and Hippolytus. The background to such exchanges was the Alexandrian school, and the Hindu-Hellenistic cultural encounter which had been underway since Alexander’s conquests in Northern India. 39 Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), chapter 23.

194

Insight and Analysis

was radical, as Augustine began to realize the significance of the fact that God’s truth had been communicated through the culture of the Hebrews, a people akin to the tribes that lived on the margins of Augustine’s RomanNorth African world. Brown writes of Augustine’s new approach to culture in De Doctrina Christiana: He began by remarking that culture was a product of society: it was a natural extension of language. It was so plainly the creation of social habits as to be quite relative. There could be no absolute standards of classical “purism.”40

Brown concludes: “It is a rare thing to come across a man of sixty, living on the threshold of a great change, who had already come to regard a unique culture and a unique political institution as replaceable.”41 Nor was Augustine’s insight, which somehow crystallizes the attitude of the Fathers to pagan classical culture, lost in the Christian West. It is present in the Scholasticism of the Victorines in the High Middle Ages, and it reemerges with force in the Renaissance debate over the language of Scripture. So in the sixteenth century we find Giles of Viterbo and Cajetan at loggerheads over the question of the value of Greek as opposed to Hebrew: for Cajetan the latter is primitive and defective, whereas for Giles it is perfect, for it is the vehicle of God’s revelation. The debate seems to have constituted part of the background to the querelle des anciens et des modernes, which Gadamer sees as a feature of the emergence of modernity in the West.42 Of course, in the period of the Enlightenment Hume and Gibbon would range themselves on the side in the debate opposite to Augustine and Giles.

2.1 Intersubjectivity and the Christian cultural subject The relativization of culture that emerges with Christianity comes about, therefore, because Christianity realizes itself to be, in Ratzinger’s words, a “cultural subject”: it itself is a community constituted by common meanings and values, expressed and communicated in common symbols and aesthetic carriers of meaning, allowing and effecting intersubjective communication both between its members and between those members and Christ, the

40 Ibid., p. 265. 41 Ibid., p. 266. 42 Hans-Georg Gadamar, Truth and Method, J. Cummings and G. Barden (eds.) (London: Sheed and Ward, 1975), pp. 20, 242.

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

195

head of the mystical Body. Turning back to Lonergan, we do not find in chapter 14 of Method in Theology (on communications), or chapter 12 (on doctrines), which together treat of evangelization, an analysis of the Church as a “cultural subject.” So we return to the question asked at the beginning of this chapter: is Ratzinger’s notion of Christianity as a cultural subject, with his allied notion of “interculturality,” a classicist approach from Lonergan’s perspective? I think not. Rather, I believe there is an important complementarity between their approaches. The primary focus of Lonergan’s attention in these chapters in Method is the manner in which Christian dogma develops: the truths of faith revealed in one culture may be understood in a new way (always retaining the same meaning) in another culture. A paradigmatic example Lonergan uses to illustrate this development-with-continuity comes from mathematics: the same truth, that two plus two is four, was understood by the ancient Babylonians, later by the Greeks, and later still in modern mathematics—there is a growth of understanding of the same truth.43 This notion of development-withcontinuity is Lonergan’s central concern. However, what Ratzinger’s analysis of Christianity as the cultural subject indicates is that when Christianity is preached what is primarily preached is a person, Jesus Christ. Furthermore, that person, the divine Person in a human nature and consciousness, is a cultural subject: one cannot prescind from encountering and in some way embracing the Word made flesh without at once embracing the culture taken up and transformed in his humanity—”for salvation is from the Jews” (John 4.22), or in the words of Pius XI, “we are all Semites spiritually.” All this, however, is implicit in Lonergan’s approach. What is distinctive about Christianity is the intersubjective encounter with Christ Jesus, and what Christian evangelization is about is proclaiming Christ Jesus. That communication invites an encounter with the incarnate meaning of the incarnate Word. As Lonergan writes, “The word, then, is personal. Cor ad cor loquitur: love speaks to love, and its speech is powerful.”44 And again: We express ourselves, we communicate, through the flesh, through words and gestures, the unnoticed movements of the countenance, pauses, all the manners in which, as Newman says, “cor ad cor loquitur,” the heart speaks unto the heart. And the Incarnation and the Redemption are the supreme instance of God communicating to us in this life.45

43 Lonergan, Method in Theology, p. 325. 44 Ibid., p. 113. 45 Crowe (ed.), Collected Works, Vol. 6, pp. 65–66.

196

Insight and Analysis

On Lonergan’s view, the person is not a monad but comes to be himself through the “mutual self-mediation” of a community or culture (such mutual self-mediation being what is written about by novelists as they trace the intricacies of interpersonal relations in community);46 this applies equally to the Word made flesh. One cannot come close to another without in some ways coming close to his culture. The images and symbols to which the Sacred Heart responded as truly manifesting the truths and values which Jesus had come to communicate must also become the sources of my authentic feelings, my intentional responses to truth and value, if I am truly to enter into an intersubjective communion with him. And those images and symbols, signs and words are, as Ratzinger shows, that which is transformed yet fundamentally confirmed by the Word incarnate. Indeed, as Lonergan argues, our faith affirms that this Jewish culture was prepared as the seed bed of the Incarnation over generations. Following Eric Voegelin, Lonergan points out that the control or integration of symbols and signs in Israel took place not through any philosophical critique but through the purification wrought by the prophetic word which, from the viewpoint of faith, we take to have been a divine work.47 This particular culture with its worldview, its theology, and its anthropology, is, from the viewpoint of faith, a culture with a normativity no other can claim: it was a people formed by Yahweh for the coming of the Word. The account of evangelization given by Lonergan in chapters 12 and 14 of Method may benefit from an analysis such as Ratzinger’s. While Lonergan’s examination of the continuity and development of truths about the faith through diverse cultures is essential, still it needs to be complemented by an appreciation of the cultural implications of saying that at the center of evangelization is the intersubjective encounter with the person Jesus Christ. I have indicated already some of the elements in Lonergan’s work which might prove helpful in teasing out the theological implications involved in such a reflection. The relativization of cultures which takes

46 Lonergan, “The Mediation of Christ in Prayer,” in ibid., 176. The theme of the Cor ad cor loquitur, intersubjective communion of feeling between Christ and his followers, found in Lonergan’s writings could provide a starting point for a theology of the Sacred Heart; such a theme could be fruitfully reflected upon in the context of what Lonergan has to say about some dogmatic developments as being characterized principally by “a refinement of feelings.” 47 Lonergan, Way to Nicea, p. 110. It is perhaps interesting to note, given Lonergan’s contention that the anthropological, as opposed to classicist, idea of culture entails study of distinctive forms of commonsense, that in Insight he enumerates “Catholic” commonsense as a distinct type (Lonergan, Insight, p. 416).

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

197

place in Christianity, so evident in St. Augustine’s relativization of “classical culture,” occurs precisely from a realization of the implications of this theological fact: the least of all peoples, the people of Israel, has been chosen as the vehicle for God’s salvation of the world. Precolonial evangelization was always a realization of this. It is not ethnocentric imperialism that takes a cultural story as in some way normative for all human cultures and therefore proclaims in the name of truth that this cultural story, not the old one (however adaptable the old may be to the new), is now normative. Both Lonergan and Ratzinger argue that the authenticity of any culture is gauged precisely in terms of its openness to the true and the good from whatever source this may come. There are many self-destructive inconsistencies in modern Western relativism, but one of the most evident is its own metanarrative of cultural encounter which denies what has in fact occurred through most cultures and historical periods: the permeability of cultures one to another; the abandonment, at times painful, of traditions and religious worldviews because new ones have been accepted. It is not for the modern Western relativist to impose (great irony here of course) his metanarrative on the cultures of human history so as to attempt some “antiethnocentric” policing and protection from the pain of conversion. However, beyond drawing out the implications of aspects of Lonergan’s work that allow a fuller acknowledgment of Ratzinger’s point that Christianity is a cultural “subject,” one may observe that there is a yet more radical thesis in Lonergan’s work that goes beyond Ratzinger’s analysis of a certain “cultural normativity” implicit in Christianity: the thesis of “the origins of Christian realism.”

2.2 Christian realism as a cultural catalyst In the chapter on “Communications” in Method Lonergan writes, concerning evangelization and inculturation: The pluralist acknowledges a multiplicity of cultural traditions. In any tradition he envisages the possibility of diverse differentiations of consciousness. But he does not consider it his task either to promote the differentiations of consciousness or to ask people to renounce their own culture.48

Something of what Lonergan means by “differentiations of consciousness” has been sketched above. However, there is a very significant, and perhaps

48 Lonergan, Method in Theology, p. 363.

198

Insight and Analysis

easily overlooked, modification made by Lonergan of the position he expresses in Method in one of his last papers, “Unity and Plurality,” dating from 1982. There we read, of communications and evangelization, “There follows a manifold pluralism. It remains that within the realm of undifferentiated consciousness there is no communication of doctrine except through available rituals, narratives, titles parables, metaphors.” So far, this expresses the same ideas one finds in Method. However, Lonergan continues, An exception to this last statement must be noted. The educated classes in a society, such as was the Hellenic, normally are instances of undifferentiated consciousness. But their education had among its sources works of genuine philosophers, so that they could be familiar with logical operations and take propositions as objects on which they reflected and from which they inferred. In this fashion the meaning of homoousion for Athanasius was contained in a rule concerning propositions about the Father and the Son: What is true of the Father also is true of the Son, except that the Son is not the Father. Similarly, the meaning of the one person and two natures mentioned in the second paragraph of the decree of Chalcedon stands forth in the repeated affirmation of the first paragraph, namely, it is one and the same Son our Lord Jesus Christ that is perfect in divinity and the same perfect in humanity. . . . Now the meaning of the first paragraph can be communicated without the addition of any new technical terms. But it can give rise to reflection and to questions. Only after someone asks whether the divinity is the same as the humanity and, if not, then how can the same be both God and man, is it relevant to explain that a distinction can be drawn between person and nature, that divinity and humanity refer to two natures, that it is one and the same person that is both God and man. Such logical clarification is within the meaning of the decree. But if one goes on to raise the metaphysical question whether person and nature can be really distinct or the anthropological question whether there can be any real distinction between subject and subjectivity, then the issue is being transported from the fifth century to the thirteenth on the metaphysical issue, and to the twentieth on the anthropological issue. One not only steps beyond the context of Chalcedon, but also beyond the capacity of undifferentiated consciousness to discover any possible solution.49

In this passage, Lonergan is gesturing in the direction not only of his own contributions in the area of Christology and the Trinity but also toward his thesis concerning an implicit “differentiation of consciousness” that goes forward within the development of dogma: the emergence of “Christian realism”—that is, not only a distinctive Christian metaphysic, as integral to the Christian cultural worldview, but a distinctive Christian epistemology.

49 Lonergan, Third Collection, pp. 243–244.

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

199

The passage also places in context the previous passage from Method. In the light of the subsequent remarks one can see that in the earlier passage Lonergan has undifferentiated, or “primitive,” consciousness in mind as the receiver of the Christian message. But in the later passage he takes cognizance of other stages of consciousness as possible receivers of that same message. In light of this, if one is going to communicate the Christian message effectively to cultures with a more differentiated consciousness (or rather with elements of, for example, philosophical or theoretical differentiation present in the culture), one will have to be on the level of that task. Furthermore, if the truth of Christianity is to be effectively communicated, questions and further questions have to be met. And this will only be achieved by further theoretical differentiation, or (in a “turn to the subject”) by the shift to interiority, in the modern context. If this is so then it cannot be true, in an unqualified way, that the pluralist evangelizer avoids promoting differentiations of consciousness. For in order effectively to communicate Christian truth, not error or myth, he may very well have to invite the hearers of the message to move from commonsense meaning to an understanding involving some theoretical elements and, at the limit, metaphysical and psychological elements, if authentic questions are to be met. One may indeed expect such differentiated forms of evangelization to occur in cultures such as those of Asia, where commonsense and religious elements are complemented by metaphysical and psychological traditions of speculation of some sophistication. We need to understand further something of the significance of this for Lonergan’s bold claim concerning a normativity implicit in Christian culture. Foundational in Lonergan’s view of method in theology are three conversions: intellectual, moral, and religious. Intellectual conversion is a matter of moving away from all forms of naive realism, empiricism, idealism, rationalism, and relativism to an adequate cognitional theory and epistemology which can be justified in a self-referential manner; this basic position (which may be indefinitely improved but not radically revised under pain of incoherence) will then provide the basis for the adumbration of a critically grounded metaphysics, ethics, and natural theology. Being intellectually converted is a matter of moving out of the world of the infant, the world of immediacy, into the world mediated by meaning; it is being able to make explicit in knowledge of the self the intellectual and moral operations used since childhood of which, due to the “polymorphism” of consciousness, it is extremely difficult to give an accurate account. Lonergan sees this work of adumbrating a self-consistent basic philosophical position as occurring within an historical tradition and precisely because of that tradition.

200

Insight and Analysis

Not only are Aristotle and Aquinas key figures here, but because it is necessary to reappropriate their basic insights in terms of a philosophy based on the data of one’s own consciousness others in the tradition such as Augustine, Descartes, and Newman are also essential contributors. Lonergan’s attitude to the Western intellectual tradition, then, is one of acknowledged dependency but at the same time critical retrieval. The metaphysical terms and relations which the theologian may critically justify in terms of the evidence of consciousness are congruent with many of those found in the tradition, primarily as represented by Aquinas. Lonergan’s “movement to the third stage of meaning” (focusing on consciousness, interiority) is, therefore, neither a Wittgensteinian kicking away of the ladder once one has used it to ascend to where one would, nor an Hegelian Aufhebung which sees past elements as “blind” in their incompleteness. Such an appropriation of Western culture, as critical of that culture’s shortcomings as it truly is, is indeed a strong claim concerning a normativity implicit in that culture. But as it stands it is a claim that de facto through the mediation of forces within that culture one is able to mount to a critical epistemology and metaphysics. Given this thesis one could argue that since on Lonergan’s view the intellectual and moral operations implicit in human acting are transcultural, other cultures could just as well provide the milieu for the process of self-mediation required for such development. Indeed, while Lonergan did not delve much into the intricacies of the religious philosophies of Asia there is plenty of evidence that the theoretical differentiation has been operative there, and that the move to interiority, or reflection on consciousness, is present in such religious-philosophical speculation, just as one finds explorations into consciousness (anticipating a philosophical position that would exploit this in a systematic fashion) in Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas.50 However, Lonergan’s analysis of the “origins of Christian realism” appears to be an even stronger thesis than this: it is a thesis concerning an intellectual normativity implicit in Christianity precisely as Christian. The process that witnessed the emergence of Christian dogmas was, Lonergan believes,

50 One may observe how even in Anglo-American philosophical circles of late there have appeared works relating philosophical discussions well known in the Western tradition to similar debates in the history of Asian philosophy. For example, see Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad’s (1995) treatment of the epistemological debate between Vasubandhu and Sankara, “Dreams and the Coherence of Experience,” American Philosophical Quarterly 32: 225–239.

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

201

a dialectical one.51 The word of God as truth was apprehended in diverse differentiations of consciousness, in commonsense, symbolic, or aesthetic manners, but always as true. Furthermore, as further questions arose, this word of God as truth was the subject of questioning, of attempts to understand its implications. Lonergan insists that any attempt to play off the “simple integrity of the gospel” against the “corruption of Hellenized dogma,” whether this be espoused by biblical “romantics” or those operating from a philosophical position (e.g., L. Dewart or B. Welte), does justice neither to what Catholic faith nor to what reason tell us of this process of dogmatic development. The dialectic operative in the process manifests itself in the way various philosophical tendencies resist the emergence of the Trinitarian and Christological dogmas. Lonergan stresses that the very philosophical positions that resisted their emergence are in important respects similar to the philosophies that today continue to deny the cogency of the dogmas.52 In accepting the truths of faith as taught by the magisterium the Christian is a “dogmatic realist.” That is, he believes the truths proposed for him to judge as true on the authority of the Word of God. Nor, on Lonergan’s view, can one play off “cold propositions” against the “interpersonal encounter” with Christ. This is a large topic, one with which Lonergan was concerned one way or another in much of his work, but a couple of points will suffice to indicate how the issue can be approached. First, in Aristotelian-Thomist terms knowledge is not primarily via correspondence (proposition over against thing with which it is concerned) but by intentional identity between knower and known. Second, propositions are means by which we necessarily express insights into fact and value in our lives, including the vital area of interpersonal relations. Without such insights, which are myriad, and occur in the complexity of relations, these relations could hardly be described as interpersonal at all—for aspects of human intersubjectivity are also shared by the higher animals. Third, affirming truths about what a relationship is can be essential to the flourishing of that relationship (truths about one’s marriage, for example). And to affirm as true that God did not get a man to die for us and free us from our sins but that God did this himself makes all the difference to our intersubjective relationship with Christ Jesus.

51 See Lonergan, Way to Nicea; also “The Origins of Christian Realism” (1961), and “Theology as Christian Phenomenon,” in Crowe (ed.), Collected Works, Vol. 6; and “The Origins of Christian Realism,” in Lonergan, Second Collection, 1974. 52 Lonergan, Way to Nicea, section 1, p. 8.

202

Insight and Analysis

The Christian as dogmatic realist accepts the truths of faith in judgment in a way cognate with the critical realist’s position that truth is known only in judgment: not in sensate experience alone, nor in a combination of that experience with understanding, but through a judgment as to the truth, falsehood, or probability of that understanding of experience. Given natural human tendencies toward various forms of picture-thinking (such as empiricism or naive realism, on the one hand, or idealism and rationalism, on the other), there will be a resistance to the view, implicit in the Christian dogmatic affirmation, that truth is known in judgment. Thus, Lonergan finds in Tertullian, for example, a type of Trinitarian thinking which must picture reality as the spatially extended: a form of empiricism and materialism. In Origen, on the other hand, one discovers a form of Neoplatonism, caught up in philosophical confusions engendered by talking of God in terms of the Good beyond Being. It is interesting to note that on Lonergan’s view the contemporary philosophical parallels to Origen are found in the postHusserlian thought of J. Trouillard and H. Duméry. The dialectical approach he implies should be taken to their work would, I believe, extend in some way to that of Levinas and Marion.53 To argue that Christianity fell captive to Greek thought is, therefore, to understand little of what was happening. Rather, The statement that Christ is God, that Jesus of Nazareth is God, created Christian philosophy; working from its presuppositions, you are forced to some sort of ontology. At Nicea, there was not an adequate basis provided by any Greek philosophy. The current philosophies of the time were Stoicism and Platonism and Epicureanism, and none of them would bear the type of thinking represented by the homoousion, the consubstantiale, of Nicea. A new type of philosophy would have to be developed to enshrine, to be able to

53 Crowe (ed.), Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 125 n. 8. The materials for a detailed “face-to-face” encounter between Lonergan and E. Levinas are certainly there. In his own way Lonergan acknowledges the importance of the phenomenology of the “face” (see ibid., pp. 96–98; pp. Method in Theology, 59–60). Like Levinas he rejects an epistemological and ethical solipsism (which Levinas detects in Husserl and Heidegger); knowledge of self or consciousness is a knowledge of an aspect of Being, and, also, it is achieved as ethical endeavor toward, ultimately, the Other of God. Further, such an endeavor can only come about, de facto, within the context of authentic community. However, much divides the two thinkers precisely in terms of the difference in traditions noted in note 32 above. From Lonergan’s perspective one would have to bring out the inevitable cognitional and metaphysical consequences implicit in Derrida’s critique (of course denied by him) of Levinas in terms of an incoherent attempt to slip free of the language of the “same” (which is, in fact, employed) to refer to the “Other.”

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

203

include, that notion, a philosophy in terms of existence in the medieval sense. It was not something readymade that the Fathers borrowed from the Greeks; there was no Greek philosophy they could borrow to express what they concluded from revelation. Aristotle never was much esteemed by the Greek Fathers; he was looked upon, at that time, as simply an empiricist—a judgement that has not a little foundation in the Aristotelian writings.54

According to the thesis of Christian realism, then, the worldview implicit in Christianity involves not only a distinctive theology, cosmology, and anthropology but also a distinct epistemology—namely, an epistemology that implies that forms of empiricism or idealism are inimical to Christian faith. This philosophical position becomes increasingly explicit in the tradition itself through the lived tradition of faith within which the pronouncements of the magisterium play their role, and as we move from the reflections of Augustine to those of Aquinas to those of twentieth-century Christian thinkers such as Lonergan. That Christian tradition is itself the “way down” (to use a Lonerganian expression): the culture of meanings and values in which Lonergan was able to delineate anew, with a precision and accuracy at the level of our philosophical times, that critical Christian realism from “below upwards” (i.e., from reflection on consciousness to an adumbration of a metaphysics, ethics, theology). This Christian worldview, then, is no product of Hellenized philosophy, or of any other particular contribution made from a cultural context in which Christianity has grown. On Lonergan’s view it is a distinctive Christian philosophical worldview. This thesis is a claim concerning the normative elements in Christian culture even more radical than that outlined by Ratzinger. Such a thesis is cognate with the views on the origins of the scientific worldview expressed by scholars such as Whitehead and, more recently, Stanley Jaki. On their view the scientific worldview of the West can only be understood within the metaphysical context of the Judaeo-Christian worldview. One might add that, for better or worse, the scientific worldview of the West has enjoyed far more missionary success in all parts of the globe than its supposed Christian parent. Now, however, in a post-Christian Western culture one witnesses a form of tragic battle, a struggle to the death between the Cain of scientism and the Abel of philosophical relativism. According to Lonergan’s notion of the origins of Christian realism, then, there was a certain inevitability about the way in which the preaching of the Christian faith in various cultural contexts during the first millennium

54 Crowe (ed.), Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 262. See, also the celebrated book review, “The Dehellenization of Dogma,” in Lonergan, Second Collection.

204

Insight and Analysis

would involve a “promotion” of the differentiations of consciousness, as that message was received and its meaning and implications for life were sought. Yet this will also be inevitable in our own day. In preaching the Word as true in the developed cultures of Asia one will also encounter cultures suffused with elements of the theoretical, and, further, in whatever part of the globe the Christian message is preached Western science is already there proclaiming some kind of worldview which, given the exigencies of human being, will have to be related in a meaningful way to the prior cultural traditions of the region, which may or may not have already elements of the theoretical differentiation of consciousness within them. If the distorted progeny of the Christian worldview, scientism and relativism, are not to gain a foothold that would resist the preaching of the faith, then the readiness to “promote” philosophical differentiation in the culture is all the more urgent. As we have seen, Lonergan argues vigorously that Christian realism, the philosophical worldview of Christianity, arose in dialectical tension with the existing philosophies of the first millennium. This is not to deny the enormous importance of the “Greek discovery” of mind for this process, but it is to place it in proper perspective. If it is the Christian doctrines that bring about this new worldview, this new philosophy, with its metaphysics and epistemology, then it should be clearly understood that in promoting such a worldview one is not promoting European culture but Christian culture. This is witnessed to not only by the very evolution of that worldview but by the withdrawal of Western culture from this worldview in another dialectical process which has gone on apace since, at least, the Enlightenment. Today in a largely secularized West the theological, anthropological, and cosmological perspectives of Christianity are ignored or challenged in terms of materialism, relativism, and the like. Ultimately the question of evangelization and inculturation is not a matter of West and East, North and South, but of Christianity and its reception in the world as a whole. The passing of the modern period of “colonial evangelization” should help us gain this perspective ever more clearly. In reality we are in a situation more akin to those of the early centuries of evangelization: a situation in which Christianity does not enjoy cultural hegemony. In terms of the Lonerganian theory of Christian realism what is at issue here is an intellectual conversion which must take place, sooner or later, within the cultures Christianity encounters. Just as the intellectual and moral operations of the human person are, Lonergan argues, transcultural, so is the “polymorphism” of human consciousness; so also is the difficulty of moving from the world of infant immediacy to an account of how we come to know

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

205

reality and the good in a world mediated by meaning. Significantly, in this regard, Lonergan draws attention to the family resemblances between (Western) Platonism and (Eastern) Brahminism in their failure to effect just such a philosophical transition: they are unable to express philosophically the criteria for correct knowledge of reality—criteria with which, without explicit reflection, we operate spontaneously from childhood.55 The philosophical issue, therefore, is not primarily one of East versus West. Lonergan relates the story of a missionary who was able to convert a Japanese bonze only after he had assisted the later to grasp the principle of noncontradiction: that not all paths up Mount Fujiyama were one and the same.56 One may reflect that the same problem occurs at present for the evangelizer in the post-Christian West, where relativism and indifferentism are the order of the day for many. Lonergan’s principle, enunciated in the final chapter of Method, that the evangelist should not ask others to renounce their culture but should rather seek ways to “proceed from within their culture . . . making it into a vehicle for communicating the Christian message,”57 is totally laudable as the ideal for which to strive. But once this is situated in the context of other perspectives from his work, namely, the thesis on “Christian realism,” one can appreciate that in many situations the new wine will not sit well in old bottles. Thus, a culture that has at its center human sacrifice (e.g., the Aztec) or a culture that feels its metaphysicopolitical ethic threatened by Christianity (e.g., Japan in the seventeenth century) will experience no little upheaval as the old metaphysical worldview is replaced. This is equally so in the modern West. For a post-Christian culture to accept once more the Christian metaphysic and anthropology, the relativism and materialism in which the only still point in a turning world is some kind of communality based on hedonism must be repudiated and an anthropological view of the sacredness of human life from conception to death accepted, along with the social ethic of human solidarity which this anthropology implies. One may examine what Lonergan has to say about this Christian realism, as distinctive of, I would say, Christian culture, from the angle of his analysis of the three conversions (intellectual, moral, religious). He distinguishes between a general definition of religious conversion, as a “falling in love in an un-restricted way” with the otherworldly and transcendent, on the one

55 Crowe (ed.), Collected Works, Vol. 6, pp. 120–121. 56 Lonergan, Understanding and Being, p. 301. 57 Lonergan, Method in Theology, p. 363.

206

Insight and Analysis

hand, and how this may be judged to be actually achieved, on the other.58 To be authentic, religious conversion must be ongoing; it must also promote moral and intellectual conversion. This is a methodological or phenomenological point concerning religion and conversion in general, without specific reference to any particular religion. But one can note that even from this perspective what Lonergan is suggesting is that a religious conversion or a religion may ultimately be assessed in terms of how well it promotes views congruent with the epistemology and metaphysics that arise, historically, from Christianity. However, there is more to be observed with regard to the analysis of the triple conversions. Later in Method Lonergan writes, “Men may or may not be converted intellectually, morally, religiously. If they are not, and the lack of conversion is conscious and thoroughgoing, it heads for loss of faith.” And he continues, “while the unconverted may have no real apprehension of what it is to be converted, at least they have in doctrines the evidence both that there is something lacking in themselves and that they need to pray for illumination and seek instruction.”59 When one reflects on this passage from the perspective of the Christianrealism thesis one appreciates that one of the issues being touched upon is that resistance to the rise of Christian dogmas and Christian realism can arise from philosophical positions that in some way still resist their acceptance; and such resistance, one may anticipate, is transcultural. The passage is also worth pondering with regard to a topic debated among students of Lonergan’s work: how does the “phenomenologically” outlined “religious conversion” stand to conversion to a specific religion, to Christianity? One may methodologically describe some features of religious conversion in general (the orientation to other-worldliness), and even have some “religion-independent” criterion in evaluating a religion or a religious conversion in terms of how well it ultimately fosters intellectual and authentic moral conversion. However, the further question arises: above

58 Lonergan, Method in Theology, pp. 283–284. The broader and deeper perspectives opened up by Lonergan and Ratzinger for the theme of inculturation and evangelization entail that Rahner’s often cited position that Vatican II marked a shift from a European to a world Church has only limited value. It is not so much the case that Christianity is or was a European phenomenon as that Europe is a Christian phenomenon. 59 Lonergan, Method in Theology, pp. 298–299. These words of Lonergan are in some way echoed by (the then) Cardinal Ratzinger in his address to the 1998 Synod of Asian Bishops in Rome, when he affirmed that experience is not the measure of the truths of faith, rather it is itself judged and transformed by those truths.

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

207

and beyond moral and intellectual criteria how can one evaluate religious conversion? The last passage cited shows that this cannot be done in a “nondenominational” way; it has to be from the viewpoint of some specific religious conversion, such as that to Christianity. Evaluating the authenticity of a religious conversion is evaluating an ongoing process, not just simply noting that religious conversion is “toward the unworldly.” One can write, as Lonergan occasionally does, of being an authentic or inauthentic Buddhist, Hindu, etc., but from a religion-neutral or merely phenomenological viewpoint this cannot be consistently pursued, for it implies that when a Buddhist or Hindu rejects such and such a doctrine or typical feature of his religion then the conversion is inauthentic. But it is not for the methodologist to determine whether it is the dissident or the doctrine in question that is inauthentic; that may only be determinable from the viewpoint of the conversion to the specific faith itself. Thus, when Lonergan writes that the unconverted need to pray and seek instruction in order to accept doctrine he is presuming a specific faith commitment. Finally, then, the authenticity of religious conversion, when this involves questions over and above what may be examined in terms of intellectual and moral criteria, can only be determined from within a faith context: as a Catholic I see another’s rejection of some teaching of his faith not as inauthentic but, perhaps, as a move along the road of authenticity. As an evaluation of the contextualization and embeddedness of Western intellectual endeavor Lonergan’s analysis of the origins of Christian realism has a peculiarly postmodern ring to it. Where the Enlightenment sought freedom from that context, the postmodern thinker is adept at detecting just where the Christian presuppositions of Enlightenment proclamations of self-evident truths and moral principles appear at the margins. But as was noted above, both Lonergan and MacIntyre as Catholic thinkers make common cause with postmodern critiques of modernity only to part company with them in showing that they are parasitic upon what they would oppose. Thus, Christian realism, as providing the context for the genius of Aquinas, provides also indications of an epistemological critique of postmodernity. To say that intellectual endeavor is embedded in Christian faith is not thereby to vitiate that endeavor, but rather, just as science has relied on cultural context (Popper’s “metaphysical research programmes”) for genuine advance, so Christianity fosters the context and the virtues for genuine advance in truth. It was perhaps no accident that one of the most severe critiques of epistemological skepticism issued from the newly converted Augustine in the Contra Academicos. And there is deconstructive irony in the way the constitution Dei Filius of the First Vatican Council, and the encyclical Pascendi of Pope St. Pius X, provided the context in which

208

Insight and Analysis

intellectual endeavor in Catholicism could move confidently on, steering between the Scylla of nineteenth-century fideism and neo-Kantian modernism and the Charybdis of eighteenth and nineteenth-century rationalism and positivism. For the Enlightenment dream of unfettered rationality had only issued in a nightmarish oscillation between profound Nietzschean skepticism and heady Comtean positivism. At this point it would be well to sum up the principal points made in the argument of this section. First, it has been argued that Ratzinger’s analysis of Christianity as a “cultural subject” is not, from the perspective of Lonergan’s thought, an instance of classicism reasserting itself. Lonergan’s own analysis of classicism is not to be taken out of context. Indeed Ratzinger’s analysis helps to draw attention to elements in Lonergan’s work that may require development. Thus, insofar as for both Lonergan and Ratzinger embracing Christianity is entering into an intersubjective relationship with the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, just so this intersubjective relationship will involve a participation in the culture that the Word assumed, transformed, but fundamentally confirmed. Second, Lonergan proposes a more radical thesis than that proposed by Ratzinger, but in the direction of Ratzinger’s thought. This is Lonergan’s notion of “Christian realism”: a specifically Christian “philosophy” or worldview, involving theological, metaphysical, and anthropological but also epistemological elements. While this worldview emerges in clarity only over time, and through a process with particular historical and cultural features, still it is intrinsic to Christianity and is, therefore, transcultural. Therefore any culture, be it Western or Eastern, must adapt to the exigencies of this Christian worldview if the faith is authentically to take root in it; this process, ideally, will involve some “fusion of horizons” between the receptor culture and Christianity, for at base all cultures are equally human cultures. But it cannot evade the cross of conversion, which also involves leaving “home and family” to follow the Lord.

3. Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus Toward the end of his 1993 lecture Ratzinger turns his attention to the radical nature of Christian conversion as this is seen by the Fathers. This theme is not new in his theology. It is one upon which he dwelt in the course of a critical reflection on Rahner’s approach to the question of the salvation of the non-baptized: the question of the universality yet historical particularity of Christianity, issues which Rahner has discussed under the rubric of

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

209

“anonymous Christianity.”60 Ratzinger notes what he sees as positive elements in Rahner’s Hearers of the Word but then goes on to outline what he sees as the heart of Rahner’s conceptual solution to the questions which arise in this area, and, in a series of questions, asks whether this solution really does justice to the problem. He then proceeds to critique some of the more “popular” versions of “humanist Christianity” claiming to derive from Rahner but which, Ratzinger points out, do not do justice to Rahner’s analyses.61 Rahner attempts to combine the universality of history with the particularity of Christianity without sacrificing the latter’s uniqueness. According to Ratzinger, Rahner makes a first attempt at this by describing Christianity as the most successful apprehension of what is always and everywhere implicitly accepted in human consciousness.62 However, Ratzinger senses that Rahner feels more needs to be said. Rahner does so, first in terms of an analysis of Christ as the one who is apprehended as the “Absolute bringer of Salvation,” the One who alone can be said to be God’s final word in history since what is achieved in him is the highest that can be achieved in human nature. As the successful instance of human self-transcendence, Christ is in some sense the “concrete universal.” Ratzinger continues: From what has been said, it follows “that in the meeting with him [Christ] . . . the mystery of reality itself . . .” is present. Even more clearly: “The relationship to Jesus Christ, in which an individual . . . makes Jesus, present within him, the mediator of his direct relationship with God” is such “that man in his existence . . . is always already within this relationship whether he is explicitly aware of it or not.” From this, Rahner develops his basic formula of Christian existence . . .: “He who accepts his existence . . . says . . . Yes to Christ.”63

In response to this conceptual scheme, Ratzinger writes, This broadly outlined thesis of Rahner’s has something dazzling, something stupendous, about it. The particular and the universal, history and being, seem to be reconciled. . . . But is that really the answer? Is it true that Christianity

60 See Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, pp. 161–170. 61 Ibid., pp. 168–170. 62 Ibid., p. 164. The reference is to Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, translated by William V. Dych, (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1978), 151. 63 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 165; Rahner, Foundations, pp. 204–206, 225–226.

210

Insight and Analysis

adds nothing to the universal but merely makes it known? Is the Christian just man as he is? . . . Is not man as he is insufficient, that which must be mastered and transcended? Does not the whole dynamism of history stem from the pressure to rise above man as he is? Is it not the main point of the faith of both Testaments that man is what he ought to be only by conversion, that is, when he ceases to be what he is?64

Another way to grasp what is “dazzling” about the Rahnerian thesis of “anonymous Christianity” is to reflect that what was in the tradition a mysterious “marginal” doctrine of the salvation of the unbaptized has become transformed into the norm. Does this not, one may ask, reduce the missions of the Holy Spirit and the Son one to another? Is there any longer a real urgency about hearing the word and accepting the Word, of entering into intersubjective communion with Jesus of Nazareth, whose historical, incarnate presence is mediated, for the most part, through intersubjective encounter with his Body the Church? What appears to have happened in this Rahnerian construction, which makes the mysterious and marginal central, is a buckling and bending of the data of the tradition, the preaching, prayer, and teaching concerning salvation, so that it is now forced to fit in with a thesis which began life precisely as a theological model to assist in gaining insight into the belief of the faith tradition itself. By presenting this thesis of anonymous Christianity Rahner has only made us raise a new question, a question implicit in Ratzinger’s questioning: how are we to think through the eschatological urgency of conversion to Christ? This eschatological urgency, which surely cannot be rendered as peripheral to the gospel message, is what the Church in her magisterium has safeguarded through the teaching “no salvation outside the Church,” a teaching which received classic formulations at Lateran IV and Florence. There are perspectives from Lonergan that would throw light on this issue, an issue intimately connected with the themes of the distinctiveness of Christianity, evangelization, and inculturation. To begin with, I think it important to return to Mansini’s critique of Rahner. As was noted, Mansini believes that from Lonergan’s viewpoint Rahner is still captivated by a scientific ideal in theology which has not yet appreciated the shift from proof to understanding as the ideal of systematics—a shift parallel to that which has occurred in the development of modern science, but the implications of which were well known to Aquinas.65

64 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 166. 65 Mansini is not alone in believing there is quite massive disagreement between the positions of these two theologians, once the implications of their positions are

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

211

For example, is the thesis of “anonymous Christianity” framed and expressed as theological argument ex convenientiae (a model or hypothesis in the area of a systematic reflection on the doctrines of the tradition) or does it take on the dimensions of a quasi-philosophical anthropology in its own right, a system which appears to bend and buckle the data of the tradition? If Lonergan is right about systematics, then one should perhaps be as suspicious here as one would be of a scientific hypothesis which lacks critical control, or “modesty” with regard to the data it would explain. In other words, is the theory of anonymous Christianity somewhat extravagant, more than is needed for gaining insight into this area of the tradition? And does it actually do justice to all the data, including the eschatological urgency of conversion through intersubjective encounter with Christ and his Body? To add a prescriptive precept to these probings, one might say that for Lonergan, the last thing systematics is about is systems building. A second, yet allied, issue concerning the uniqueness of Christianity from the perspective of Lonergan’s work is the distance he maintained from one of the central positions of the nouvelle théologie, as this emerged in the 1940s and 1950s. Lonergan took the view, and argued the case philosophically, that one could not rule out a “state of pure nature,” while at the same time he maintained that the “state of pure nature” was itself a rather peripheral theological theorem.66 If he held the latter, one might ask, why bother to go to the trouble of defending the former notion? I think it is especially in hindsight that the point of such a defense becomes clear. What Lonergan detected in some of the aspects of the nouvelle théologie were elements cognate with a theology modelled on philosophical deduction, or demonstration, which had been manifest before in fourteenth-century nominalism and nineteenth-century semirationalism.

worked out dialectically, despite the linking of the two as “transcendental Thomists” in the standard dictionary entries. See Raymond Moloney (1984), “The Mind of Christ in Transcendental Theology: Rahner, Lonergan and Crowe,” The Heythrop Journal 25: 299–300; J. Michael Stebbins, “Introduction,” in The Divine Initiative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); Michael Vertin, “Maréchal, Lonergan, and the Phenomenology of Knowing,” in M. Lamb (ed.), Creativity and Method: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lonergan (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1981), 411–422; Guy Mansini (1998), “Rahner and Balthasar on the Efficacy of the Cross,” The Irish Theological Quarterly, 63: 232–249. 66 See “The Natural Desire to See God,” in Bernard Lonergan, Collection (2nd edn.), F.E. Crowe and R.M. Doran (eds.) (Toronto: Toronto University Press 1988); also the ample treatment of this area of Lonergan’s theology given in Stebbins, The Divine Initiative.

212

Insight and Analysis

Given this context as background, one can move on to examine some of the points relevant to our question made by Lonergan in chapter 20 of Insight, a chapter Lonergan continued to believe important in his late period as can be witnessed from his late essay “Mission and the Spirit.”67 This chapter is a Lonerganian equivalent to Rahner’s Hearers of the Word, or the philosophical reflections on the “obediential capacity” one finds in, say, Blondel. However, the differences are as significant as the similarities. For one thing, Lonergan’s position runs counter to Rahner’s central thesis concerning the “deduction” of the Incarnation from the phenomenon of the “final bringer of Salvation.” Lonergan argues that one may anticipate a divine solution, communication to humankind, given the problem of evil and the divine goodness. However, he distinguishes between what he calls “natural solutions,” “relatively supernatural solutions,” and “absolutely supernatural solutions”— among the latter of which, one may infer, would be the Incarnation.68 If Lonergan’s philosophical analysis is correct here, Rahner’s attempted transcendental deduction is stymied. For one could not deduce that the word of God claiming to be definitive (and part of the divine solution would be assistance offered to see that this was God’s definitive word as far as human history is concerned) entailed the Incarnation of the Word. One can, of course, think of concrete historical examples which would give some idea of what this could mean: for example, the Koran accepted as God’s definitive word, and ruling out an idea of Incarnation. One would be hard put to it to show that this Islamic approach was incorrect on purely philosophical grounds, and one would have to contend with Lonergan’s argument to the contrary. One of the philosophical perspectives Lonergan brings to bear on this theological issue derives from his analysis of the emergently probable course of cosmic evolution. Given the indeterminacy of stages or levels of emergence relative to future developments, the indeterminacy of the potency of a stage of cosmic development implies that one cannot always determine with exactitude what such and such a “nature” will ultimately require or demand (within the wider context of world-order) for its fulfillment. It is therefore again too quick, from a philosophical perspective, to say that human beings require divine sonship for the fulfillment “nature” demands, or that the Incarnation has any kind of cosmogenic or anthropological necessity attached to it. One might suggest that in this way, maintaining a notion of “obediential capacity” which is genuine and yet highlights indeterminacy, Lonergan

67 In Lonergan, Third Collection, pp. 23–34. 68 Lonergan, Insight, pp. 725.

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

213

does more justice to the Barthian insistence on the novelty and sovereign freedom of divine self-communication. In a number of ways Ratzinger’s questions concerning the adequacy of Rahner’s analysis are cognate with Lonergan’s treatment in chapter 20 of Insight. Just as Ratzinger indicates that Christianity and conversion have more to do with “going beyond” being a man than with accepting oneself as such, and that history’s own tension manifests this struggle, so Lonergan insists that the heightened tension, which would result from a supernatural solution, would not lack its objectification in the dialectical succession of human situations . . . when this problem of evil is met by a supernatural solution, human perfection itself becomes a limit to be transcended . . . there will be a humanism in revolt against the proffered supernatural solution . . . rest[ing] on man’s proud content to be just a man, and its tragedy is that, on the present supposition of a supernatural solution, to be just a man is what a man cannot be.69

What this analysis of Lonergan’s suggests is that every form of “humanism” is some fundamental form of alienating ideology. A constant theme of John Paul II’s pontificate was the Holy Father’s proclamation of the teaching of Gaudium et Spes: in revealing God to man, Christ at once reveals man to himself. Perhaps one may say, then, that any form of “humanism,” of human religion has to it the tragic aspect of concealing and alienating man from himself, since none propose precisely that self-revelation of man as son in the Son, to which dignity he is called and compelled. And here one can include all religions of humankind to some extent which, unlike Christianity, are not the self-revelation of God, whatever their undoubted God-given goodness may be. To reverse Rahner’s point, that to accept oneself and one’s existence is to accept salvation, one may urge that the tragic element in history involves mutually self-mediating meaning and (dis)values in human beliefs which precisely prevent any real discovery of who one is or what one is, most fundamentally, called to be. Thus, without the Word I cannot accept my existence, for I know not what that self and that existence are, or are meant to be. Here we may return to the methodological issue of a systematics which is truly “modest” and which truly strives to do justice, through models and analogies, to the truths of faith. For one can ask whether the Rahnerian scheme of things does justice to the massive theme in revelation of the profound tragedy which marks the history of the human race in its alienation

69 Ibid., pp. 728–729.

214

Insight and Analysis

from God, a tragedy which goes hand in hand with the wonder of redemption from the thrall of such alienation. We need, then, models that do justice to the drama of conversion, to the passionate desire for the Word, and intersubjective communion with Him and his Body—models that do justice to the eschatological urgency of conversion, and the redemption of a whole universe in the pangs of giving birth, as the Pauline vision has it. A key element in Rahner’s account is the analogy or model of the move from “anonymous Christianity” to explicit conversion to Christ provided by the philosophical analysis of the way a person may move from implicit, unthematic “knowledge” to explicit, thematic knowledge regarding, for example, his own cognitive capacities. Although Lonergan and Rahner have divergent views of knowledge, consciousness, and this very process of explication, one may grant from Lonergan’s perspective that something akin to what Rahner describes can occur in the process of individual selfdiscovery. No doubt, one can say that such a process is indeed a good both for the individual and for the human community, and is vitally important as history progresses: for we have seen how vitally important intellectual conversion is for Lonergan. However, the question remains whether this transition, or conversion from implicit to explicit, provides us with a dramatic enough instance for understanding the drama of conversion to Christ. For myriad are those in human history (saints included) who have lived out authentic lives without such a process of self-discovery. Can we say that for the individual such a growth in self-knowledge is so decisive or totally necessary? For it does not appear that the gospel call to conversion is offered in such an “optional” manner, or to the few who might benefit from it and mediate its benefits to others. There is, I believe, a more dramatic anthropological model to be found in Lonergan’s work which provides images for insight into the passionate urgency which the call to conversion has always manifested in Christianity. Writing of the necessity of the Word for human meaning and being, Lonergan uses the analogy of the couple who are in love but have not yet offered the word, or expression, of love to one another; when they do so the word is not optional, nor empty, but creates a new situation of mutual self-mediation in its expression.70 However, while Lonergan employs this analogy when writing of the significance of the word for religion, in Method, he provides an even more powerful anthropological image of the importance of the word in an earlier section of the work, a section dealing with linguistic meaning in which the discussion has no intended theological import.

70 Lonergan, Method in Theology, pp. 113.

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

215

The story he uses is that of the breakthrough to linguistic meaning of the dumb and mute Helen Keller. Lonergan writes, The moment of language in human development is most strikingly illustrated by the story of Helen Keller’s discovery that the successive touches made on her hand by her teacher conveyed names of objects. The moment when she first caught on was marked by the expression of profound emotion and, in turn, the emotion bore fruit in so powerful an interest that she signified her desire to learn and did learn the names of about twenty objects in a very short time. It was the beginning of an incredible career of learning.71

He goes on to draw out the existential and ontological significance for the becoming of the person of Helen Keller of this encounter with the liberating word: In Helen Keller’s emotion and interest one can surmise the reason why ancient civilizations prized names so highly. . . . Prizing names is prizing the human achievement of bringing conscious intentionality into sharp focus and, thereby, setting about the double task of both ordering one’s world and orienting oneself within it. Just as the dream at daybreak may be said to be the beginning of the process from impersonal existence to the presence of a person in his world, so listening and speaking are a major part in the achievement of that presence.72

While the move from potency to act involved in the shift from adult selfconsciousness to explicit self-knowledge, which provides Rahner with an analogy for the shift from unthematic anonymous Christianity to explicit Christian conversion, is no doubt an important good, the far more dramatic instance of Helen Keller’s transformation from inchoate, passionately frustrated conscious disorientation to a new life of presence to self and to others through the mediation of the word is a far more appropriate instance of the movement from potency to act through which to appreciate the drama of the moment of Christian conversion. Again, returning to Rahner’s point concerning self-acceptance as salvific acceptance of Christ, we can see in poor Helen Keller’s example an anthropological image of helplessness such that acceptance of oneself or one’s existence is impossible without the coming of the word which, as coming from the outside, both reveals the “other” of the teacher and the world and at once allows Helen’s own selfdiscovery and self-constitution. Sacrament-like, it effects, as effective and

71 Ibid., p. 70. 72 Ibid.

216

Insight and Analysis

constitutive meaning, what it proclaims. To return to a point made above, one can perhaps say that all “humanisms” (including all non-Christian religions), whatever noble and graced elements there may be in them, nevertheless contain “words” of obfuscation and alienation within them precisely insofar as they cannot be that incarnate Word of Christianity which reveals to persons, and effects as it reveals, their new nature as sons and daughters in the Son. A further allied question may be raised at this point. Do the gospel message of salvation and the truths of faith revealed require us to say that Christian nature, the nature of adopted divine filiation, is always and everywhere found with human nature? In other words, is Rahner’s anthropological model of anonymous Christianity a cogent way of understanding the truths of faith concerning the call to conversion? Bearing in mind the methodological point made above concerning the relation between systematics and doctrines in theological method, we can ask whether there are not only rivals to Rahner’s account here, but in fact models which do more justice to the eschatological urgency of the gospel call to conversion than does Rahner’s view. Keeping in mind the points made so far, then, I will now move on to consider a little more explicitly some questions that arise from the teaching “no salvation outside the Church.”73 The Church has always held to the teaching “no salvation outside the Church,” which received explicit formulation in the magisterium at the councils of Lateran IV and Florence, as expressing the eschatological urgency of Christian conversion found in the gospel. Since 1863, however, there have been a number of explicit statements of the magisterium that guard against false interpretations of the Church’s faith; thus, it is held that in the mysterious providence of God those not now in visible communion with Christ or his members may become so and thus see the face of God. Understandably, perhaps, these two aspects of the Church’s teaching in this area are sometimes felt to be in some tension. But one can point to other areas in the development of dogma where non-mutually-exclusive truths are finally

73 Still helpful in this area, for texts and commentary, are Joseph Fenton, The Catholic Church and Salvation (Glasgow: Sands and Co., 1959); and George J. Dyer, Limbo: Unsettled Question (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964). A more recent treatment is Francis Sullivan, Salvation outside the Church? (London: Chapman, 1992). Sullivan’s interpretation of the data in this area of doctrinal development is, however, problematic: see Avery Dulles, “The Church as Locus of Salvation,” in John M. McDermott, S.J. (ed.), The Thought of Pope John Paul II (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1993), pp. 169–188.

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

217

discerned as complementing each other within the plan of salvation. One can think of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, opposed by some in the name of the doctrine that all men and women require salvation from the fallen human state by Christ. The doctrine could be readily confessed once it was realized that it was not a negation of this truth: our Lady was truly redeemed by Christ, but in an exceptional and anticipatory manner. Perhaps the most explicit magisterial statement on the way the Church’s doctrine is to be understood is the Holy Office letter Suprema haec sacra of 1949. The letter draws an analogy between those not visibly in the Church and those who died as catechumens, or received baptism by desire in some way (e.g., soldiers in the early centuries of persecution who expressed solidarity with their intended Christian victims and thus shared their fate). The “baptism of desire” of these persons, always admitted by tradition as genuine (thus by the fathers of Florence), may be extended so as to include an “implicit desire” for baptism on the part of those not visibly in the Church but who respond to God’s grace with upright lives. It is clear, then, that salvation only comes through being incorporated into Christ. However, one should note that the document modestly states that those who live an upright life and thus may be deemed to have an implicit desire for union with Christ can be saved. It does not put flesh on the bones to say more concerning the manner of this salvation. One could go on to ask, therefore, further questions: for example, does an implicit desire need, at some point, to become more explicit if it is to be recognizably a desire for an intersubjective encounter with the incarnate Word? Indeed, other statements of the magisterium may incline one to pursue such further questions. Thus the teaching of Florence that each person must embrace the faith before death points, I believe, in the direction of some account of this “implicit” desire becoming more explicit. The alternative to Rahner’s view that “Christian nature” is always and everywhere found in history which I would suggest is that, first, we need not make this affirmation. Rather, I would suggest the anthropological model suggested by the Helen Keller story: without the encounter with incarnate Word, normally as mediated by the members of his Body, one neither knows the nature to which one is called nor does one yet share that nature. The mission of the Spirit is not collapsed into that of the Son on this account. For the passionate dynamism, the upward struggle toward the fullness of life, so strikingly exemplified in the Helen Keller story, is the unsettling, yet consoling, work of the Holy Spirit calling us toward knowledge of and reception of filiation in the Son. Not all share this nature in grace, but all experience the call to it in an implicit way. Of course, those who have

218

Insight and Analysis

received the priceless gift hear the words that “to those whom much is given much is expected,” and part of that expectation is that they share the gift with those who have not yet received it. Perhaps the Keller story, of someone so heroic and so physically challenged, suggests a broader theological analogy. In the world-order God has created there are many who are not destined to grow to maturity in the physical order of creation; numerous are those who have died as infants or before birth. In God’s mysterious design these too will grow into maturity, and that through the grace of his life, death, and resurrection. However, one can understand that the created world-order is, in some way, primarily for the full growth to maturity of human persons, without denying that these others will, in God’s mercy, do so. Analogously, all are called to the fullness of life beginning here and now in encounter with Christ, but in God’s providence many will not achieve this until an eschatological moment at the end of life; yet they will do so “through the others,” through Christ and his members. What then could one suggest in place of Christian nature always and everywhere being found, if one admits of a general desire for that nature, and also admits the teaching of the magisterium that only in the Church can there be salvation? To suggest reflections in this area pertaining to the theology of the moment of death would not be novel. The theologian B.C. Butler, reflecting upon the implications of Lonergan’s work for ecclesiology, came to the conclusion that a theological model suggesting conversion to Christ and reception into his Body at (before) the moment of death would best do justice to the theological data to be understood.74 Interestingly enough the text from Lonergan that suggested such a conclusion to Butler supports the teaching of Florence. For, Lonergan insists, the divine solution must be accepted and assented to in conscious freedom. (One can understand that the Florence assertion of the need of “acceptance before death” is itself not some drawing of an artificial line but an assertion concerning freedom.) Such a theology of the moment of death need not involve itself in the problems associated with such positions as those of L. Boros (successfully criticized by G. Grisez and others).75 In this area, I believe, there is no

74 Bishop B.C. Butler, “Lonergan and Ecclesiology,” in Philip McShane (ed.), Foundations of Theology (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1971), pp. 4–5. Butler refers to Lonergan, Insight, p. 697. 75 For Grisez’s criticism of L. Boros see, G. Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus, Vol. 1 (Chicago, IL: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983), chapter 16. J.H. Wright’s article, “Death (Theology of),” in the New Catholic Encyclopaedia (New York: McGrawHill, 1967), pp. 687–695, also critical of “fundamental option” theories of the

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

219

reason why, with due caution, theologians should not take as seriously as do a number of philosophers the data which the numerous studies on “near-death experiences” offer for analysis. One of the theologian’s doughtiest opponents, A.N. Flew, a philosopher with every reason to wish for a reductive explanation of such data, has in some of his writing admitted that much of it is extremely difficult to explain away.76 For our purposes it is interesting to observe that many of the accounts of such near-death experiences concern “conversions” of a moral and cognitive nature: persons have a different view of existence after them, may move from atheism to theism, and so forth. A theological model making sense of the data provided by the tradition could suggest that “before death” as the final separation there is such an encounter with Christ or his members as to constitute an explicit conversion: an acceptance of an intersubjective relationship with Christ. How “explicit” this would need to be in order to be a genuine intersubjective encounter freely welcomed before death (welcomed by one prepared through grace-filled upright living) is open to further reflection. But one should recall that there are lessons here in the way the tradition recognized that unbaptized catechumens or even those who died a martyrdom in solidarity with Christians were “in the Church.” Their knowledge of Christianity might be very meagre, rudimentary; but in such cases there was a genuine intersubjective encounter with Christ or his Body, not simply a transcendental orientation toward the divine or divine salvific acts. Ratzinger worries that the “transcendental orientation” to Christ is precisely that which tends to render the intersubjective encounter in history with Christ otiose. What is the difference between such a “relationship” and the relationship to possible nonincarnate divine salvific acts? What distinguishes our relation to the Son in his mission from that to the Spirit in his? No doubt the objection will be made that postulating some kind of encounter with Christ and his Body at (before) death, however mysterious an encounter it is acknowledged to be, smacks of a deus ex machina solution. However, it appears to me less strained than a theory that would postulate that those who explicitly excoriate and deny Christ and his Body or are indifferent to them, for apparently upright

moment of death, demonstrates, however, the variety of divergent theological theories in this area at the time of the appearance of Boros’ book. See also Dyer, Limbo, chapters 4 and 5, for examples of Catholic theologies from 1930 to 1960 of “the moment of death.” The aspect of interpersonal encounter is not absent from St. Thomas Aquinas’ suggested solution to the problem: see De Veritate, XIV 12. 76 See, for example, Anthony Flew, The Logic of Mortality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).

220

Insight and Analysis

reasons, are still, implicitly, in an intersubjective relationship of love with Him. This appears to strain the notion of intersubjective relationship with another incarnate person beyond any meaningful limit. Besides, there appear to be numerous divine interventions in the New Testament which from a variety of perspectives would be seen by opponents as marked with ex machina artificiality. One further observation concerning the “urgency” of the call to Christian conversion can be made. As was noted above, when those who in God’s providence are not destined to grow to “full stature” in this life are called by Him to do so in the next, it is through the Other, Christ, and his Body that they do so. The urgency of the call to conversion to Christ is then not just for my own salvation but that I might assist in the salvation of the others. The Christian message is that I am only saved in working for the salvation of others, and this is no less true regarding the mystery of the salvation of those who enter the Church and thereby assume a new Christian nature only at the eschatological point of death. Just as the infant receives baptism through the faith of others (viz., the parents), so those persons also receive that faith through the mystery of the life and faith of the Church. Through the offering of the sacrifice of the Mass, the worthy celebration and reception of the sacraments, and the living from them into daily life, God’s grace flows also to these others. God’s victory and victorious presence in this world are assured through his death and resurrection. Yet He genuinely requires our help in continuing this work: the Church can through the lives of its members be more or less effective in being a beacon of salvation to the nations. The urgency of conversion to Christ is an urgency not only for myself but also the concern that others, including those not in communion with the Body during most of the course of their lives, enter the kingdom.

4. Conclusion This chapter has taken the form of an extended reflection on issues raised in (the then) Cardinal Ratzinger’s 1993 lecture “Christ, Faith, and the Challenge of Cultures.” I have attempted an exploration of those issues from the perspective of Bernard Lonergan’s philosophy and theology. In clarifying what Lonergan means by the shift from “classicism to historical mindedness” I have not only attempted to show that a more careful and nuanced appropriation of his meaning is required than is sometimes evident, but I have attempted to elucidate some quite far-reaching consequences of his position that bear upon discussions of Christianity and culture. In particular I have indicated the quite radical implications that emerge from

Christianity, “Interculturality,” and Salvation

221

Lonergan’s analysis of the “origins of Christian realism” for discussions of inculturation and mission in a postmodern context. Lonergan’s notion of the identity of Christian culture in the ongoing contexts of history is, I suggest, a strong one. It is perhaps worth reflecting on the fact that the very scholar from whom Lonergan learned an anthropological notion of culture, Christopher Dawson, also argued forcefully for a strong version of the thesis of Christian cultural identity, not from a classicist base, but precisely in terms of anthropological and historical data.77 Lonergan’s analysis of Christian realism is both a powerful argument in favor of such cultural identity and a brilliant analysis of the way in which the divinely revealed truths of the Catholic faith are the dynamic catalysts of authentic spiritual and cultural evolution. As we now shift from a “modern” period, in which theological modernism found its milieu, to a postmodern, the writings of Lonergan, MacIntyre, and Pope Benedict XVI, among others, point the way to an authentic appropriation of what might be entailed in such a cultural shift, sifting the wheat from the deconstructive and relativist chaff.

77 On the thought of Christopher Dawson see Stratford Caldecott and John Morrill (eds.), Eternity in Time: Christopher Dawson and the Catholic Idea of History (Edinburgh: T&T Clark Publications, 1997).

Chapter 9

Rahner’s Philosophy: A Lonerganian Critique The philosopher-theologians Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan were part of a movement of renewal in Catholic intellectual life which sought to retrieve the resources of premodern Aristotelian-Thomism in order to critically engage the challenges of modernity to a religious and specifically Catholic worldview. This movement developed throughout the nineteenth century and was endorsed and encouraged by the papal magisterium beginning with the encyclical Aeterni Patris of Pope Leo XIII of 1879, an encyclical from which Lonergan would take as his motto the phrase “vetera novis augere et perficere”—“to draw new things from the old in order to perfect the old.”1 Among theological commentators from the 1960s onward, it was largely taken for granted that Rahner and Lonergan were fellow travelers along this path of retrieving and adapting Aquinas’ philosophy and theology under the influence of Maréchal’s philosophy of the dynamic, God-oriented intellect. Differences between Lonergan and Emerich Coreth concerning the starting point for philosophy were evident, but commentators could, with justification so it seemed, characterize such differences as a “friendly dispute” over details. However, during the last three decades philosophers such as Giovanni Sala2 have identified significant differences between Lonergan’s philosophy and that of Coreth (to some extent influenced by Rahner) and theologians including Raymond Moloney3, Guy Mansini4, and Neil Ormerod5 have drawn attention to quite profound differences between Rahner’s theological positions and those of Lonergan which stem from differences of philosophical viewpoint.

1 See, Bernard Lonergan, S.J., Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1957), pp. 747–748. 2 Giovanni Sala, S.J., (1972), “Immediatezza e mediazione della conoscenza dell’essere: Riflessioni sull’epistemologia di E. Coreth e B. Lonergan,” Gregorianum, 53: 45–87. 3 Raymond Moloney, S.J., (1984), “The Mind of Christ in Transcendental Theology: Rahner, Lonergan and Crowe,” Heythrop Journal, 25: 288–300. 4 Guy Mansini, O.S.B. (1988), “Quasi-Formal Causality and a Change in the Other: A Note on Karl Rahner’s Christology,” The Thomist, 54: 293–306. 5 Neil Ormerod (2003), “Wrestling with Rahner on the Trinity,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 68: 213–227.

Rahner’s Philosophy: A Lonerganian Critique

223

My aim in this chapter, then, is to contribute to a critical debate concerning the viability of these two philosophical attempts to retrieve and apply Aquinas’ philosophy to the controversies of modernity and postmodernity. My argument will be that Lonergan’s basic position on knowledge and metaphysics is fundamentally correct and can, therefore, provide the base from which to critique the quite different philosophical position advanced by Rahner. My agreement with Lonergan is based upon the fact that I do find his self-referential arguments for a four-leveled, or phased, cognitional and evaluative structure convincing. For I find that I can verify such interrelated activities in the data of my consciousness. Indeed, I find that the attempt to deny or refute the theoretical outline only serves to provide fresh evidence in the data of my consciousness for the affirmation that Lonergan’s account of cognitional and evaluative structure is true to reality. Furthermore, I also find that the basic terms and relations of his metaphysical position can be verified in the data of my consciousness in the same fashion. The direct verification of such metaphysical constituents as unity (substance) and conjugates (accidents), in this way is had because the attempt to deny them once again provides evidence for their truth, insofar as I find that I am a conscious unity going through the various cognitional activities involved in argument, these activities themselves instantiating the metaphysical notion of conjugate act (or in traditional terminology “accidents,” or “differentiae”). Since my knowledge of myself as a knower and chooser also comes about through attention to the data of my consciousness, the understanding of the intelligibility immanent in that data, and the affirmation of the actual existence of that intelligibility, I believe that I can also affirm Lonergan’s position that the metaphysical constituents of potency (or materiality), form and act can be validated. In this fashion, therefore, such traditional Thomist metaphysical distinctions between, for instance, essence (the “what it is”) and existence (“that it is”) can be verified. Not only are such metaphysical elements, and others such as finality, to be verified in an incontrovertible way in the data of consciousness, (incontrovertible insofar as the attempt to controvert the claim that they are metaphysical elements ends in selfreferential inconsistency), but the core epistemological and metaphysical position arrived at in this way receives further confirmation from the myriad instances of knowing in common sense, science, and scholarship. The core position arrived at through self-affirmation also provides a critical tool for assessing the merits or demerits of these contributions. An initial reaction to what has been said above regarding Lonergan’s position and the way it may be validated is that Rahner appears to claim the same thing for his philosophy. Is it not supposed to be a hallmark of the transcendental Thomist viewpoint that it uses retorsion to validate its claims?

224

Insight and Analysis

Lonergan does, I believe, employ such arguments in a systematic way not found in other thinkers. Further, his account of self-affirmation, and the metaphysics validated therefrom, elucidates just what is involved in some forms of self-referential argument in a way which does not occur in other thinkers. It is also true, however, that one finds such arguments in Rahner. In Foundations of Faith, for instance, one finds the classic argument, known to Aquinas, that the one who denies knowledge of truth ends in the selfcontradictory position of claiming it to be true that nothing is true.6 However, I do not believe that such arguments are found to be deployed in a systematic way by Rahner. As we know from the world of tennis, an extremely fast and powerful serve is a good weapon to have in one’s arsenal. But if the rest of one’s game is nowhere as good as one’s serve, one’s game will not amount to much. To apply the analogy to Rahner, I believe, one can grant the force of the self-referential moves he makes. But these in no way validate many of the key philosophical positions, which Rahner adumbrates, nor does Rahner attempt to validate these key positions in such a fashion. If, then, a number of Lonergan scholars have indicated areas of significant difference between the two thinkers, what of Lonergan’s overall estimation of the relation between his appropriation of Aquinas’ philosophy and that of Rahner? The most telling remark in this regard is to be found in a series of lectures Lonergan gave in Toronto in 1969, during which Lonergan commented that absent from the thought of both Maréchal and Rahner is an understanding of insight.7 For anyone with even a cursory acquaintance with Lonergan’s philosophy this remark must be understood as implying a deep suspicion on Lonergan’s part with regard to the overall cogency of Rahner’s philosophy. According to Lonergan’s hermeneutic of the history of philosophy an absence of understanding of insight will entail that a philosophical position will be bound up with the counterpositions which result from a lack of critical differentiation of the various strands which enter into the polymorphism of human consciousness. The perennial myth of knowledge as “taking a good look” is one consequence of this lack of critical selfknowledge, and a presencing metaphysics is the inevitable corollary of such representationalism or perceptualism. Even if such epistemological

6 Karl Rahner, S.J., Foundations of Christian Faith, translated by William V. Dych (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1978), p. 67. 7 The comment is made in a reply to a question, in the first question period, during the 1969 Institute on Method in Theology Lonergan gave at Regis College, Toronto. Lonergan states that “. . . Kant does not know about insight, neither does Maréchal. Rahner has the same problem. They do not understand the action of intelligence.” I am very grateful to Fr. Robert Doran, S.J. for his help in locating this quotation.

Rahner’s Philosophy: A Lonerganian Critique

225

“empiricism” be transformed into some kind of spiritual intuition or transcendental gaze at being, it remains the case that the metaphors and images employed always betray their mythical, picture-thinking starting point; a starting point uncontrolled by the consistent application of self-critical intelligent and reasonable operations. Let us recall very briefly some further aspects of Lonergan’s analysis of insight which, he believes, we may derive from St. Thomas’ thought. “Direct insight” is the act which may be verified in our conscious experience when we enjoy some understanding of the data. The agent intellect, which is nothing other than one’s conscious self asking questions concerning the data, organizes or disposes the data in such a way as to increase the probability of the occurrence of the act of understanding. Such direct insights may be in the domain of elemental meaning. That is, they may be insights into the data of the kind we witness in aesthetic appreciation of patterned sights or sounds, or in, perhaps, the preverbal insights of a fairly complex nature one can witness in the play of children between the ages of 1 and 3. When insights are expressed in the articulation possible in language an enormously expanded horizon of meaning is arrived at. Insights occur in the world of interpersonal communication in which body language and tone of voice are as much a part of the dramatic subject’s communication of insights as are the words employed, but now one can also attempt with Dr. Johnson and the lexicographers to provide descriptive, conceptually formulated definitions based on accepted usage. Beyond this differentiation of the nominal definition, there lies the possibility of insights formulated by intelligence as explanatory definitions. Lonergan’s classic example is the Euclidean definition of a circle as “a series of coplanar points equidistant from the centre.”8 Such conceptual packages, definitions, are arrived at through a conceptualization which expresses the necessary and sufficient conditions of circularity, given the understanding of the way terms and relations such as “point” and “line” must be related to create a circle. Such abstracted, universal definitions of circularity are arrived at through the agent intellect’s interrogation of the disposed data, of the geometrical images we form. Thus, Lonergan believes he discovers in Aquinas’s philosophy a number of subtle distinctions between aspects of the intelligent process of abstraction, including moments which may be identified as “objective,” “formative,” and “apprehensive” abstraction.9 In grasping some intelligible form abstracted from the data

8 Lonergan, Insight, pp. 7–12. 9 See Bernard Lonergan, S.J., Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, edited by David Burrell (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1967), pp. 151–157, 177–180.

226

Insight and Analysis

human intelligence manifests the Thomistic dictum, “intelligence in act is the intelligible in act.” However, in grasping an intelligible form or patterning, intelligence has only arrived at a possibility; that is, in order to meet its own exigency to know the real, the mind has to raise and answer the further question with regard to any intelligible content, “is it so?,” “Is it true of reality?,” “Does this actually exist?” Thus, understanding of insight is not only of direct insight but also of reflective insight, judgment. Lonergan argues that one may verify in the experience of consciousness the fundamental features of this reflective act of understanding. In order to answer the question “is it so?” one marshals and weighs the evidence, and if one finds that the conditions are fulfilled then one may reasonably judge that what intelligence has grasped is true of reality. Judgment is a rational act which emerges from a conscious grasp that there is a sufficiency of evidence to affirm as so or probably so that x is true of reality. The argument is, then, that one may verify such conscious, interrelated acts in one’s own conscious data and that the attempt to deny, or argue against the position will only serve to provide fresh data in consciousness which constitute evidence for an affirmation of the theory. The possibility of knowledge of reality is known by the fact of knowledge. And the fact of knowing reality may be arrived at through the affirmation of the truth that one is a conscious unity differentiated by the specified intelligent and reasonable acts. To deny this is incoherent because one will find that such conscious acts are truly involved in the very process of denial. Such self-refutation is then, not some merely formal affair. Rather, the refutation of all subjectivist positions such as Kant’s is had in the identification of the conscious realities of intentional acts which occurs when one grasps the incoherence of such putative truth claims as “It is really so that I cannot know what is really so.” For such claims are shown to be incoherent and not so. The attempt to deny knowledge of reality, then, only shows that reality is within our grasp since the refutation of the claim is upon the basis of the identification of the realities which are the mental acts occurring in the process of argument itself. The further point to make is the metaphysical one. In coming to know myself as a knower and chooser I show that the real, being is precisely what is to be known by intelligence and reason. Again this cannot be gainsaid, for any argument to the contrary will employ intelligence and reason to try to establish the facts of the matter. Being, or reality is, therefore, intended in my questioning as the intelligible. There can be verified in one’s knowing a notion of being as a conscious awareness of being, as that which is the intended intelligible object or objective of the knowing process.

Rahner’s Philosophy: A Lonerganian Critique

227

Finally, turning to objectivity, it may be that the reality known in a correct judgment is the reality of the knower. But knowing the reality of the knowing and choosing self is no more or less a matter of intelligent and reasonable enquiry as to what there is in reality, in being, than is the question of the reality of the no. 19 bus making its way through London. Knowledge of my mind is knowledge of a part of reality, of being, just as knowledge of the reality of the no. 19 bus is. Deconstructing the perceptualist myths which abound regarding objective knowledge entails root and branch rejection of the notion that objectivity is a matter of the perceiver perceiving an object which stands over against him or her in a visual field; some field such as is proposed in the imaginative projection which is Kant’s a priori of absolute space and time, in which objects or parcels of matter or stuff appear. Knowledge of reality, as has been argued, is attained through intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation on the basis of the data. Therefore, real differences between one entity and another, be these a perceiver and a perceived, are known not by awareness or perception of data but by a set of reasonable affirmations of the kind: A is, B is, A is not B; A is having a visual experience; B is the object of that experience. That the bar of chocolate I see in the shop is not ontologically part of me (not yet at any rate) can be reasonably affirmed given the evidence that all the aspects which I have reason to think make up the whole that I am, the cognitional, psychological, biological factors and so forth, are not intrinsically dependent or related to such an entity as this chocolate bar or other entities like it.

1. Rahner’s Oversight of Insight I have outlined above salient aspects of Lonergan’s position and have indicated ways in which these features of his philosophy, which he maintains derive in large measure from Aquinas, may be validated by reference to conscious experience. I will now proceed to identify a number of key positions in Rahner’s philosophy which, in fact, contrast with those of Lonergan. I will argue that in some instances Rahner provides little or no evidence for key aspects of his thought, and in others he espouses positions which one can identify as being at root counterpositions: that is, they stand in contradiction to the positions on knowing and being taken above, which, it was argued, can be critically validated on pain of self-referential incoherence. I will refer in what follows to Rahner’s foundational philosophical views as these are outlined both in the early work Spirit in the World, and as they appear in the volume written about 40 years later, Foundations of Christian Faith.

228

Insight and Analysis

To begin with, let us turn to Rahner’s views on self-knowledge. Early in Foundations in Faith Rahner briefly outlines his view that in every act of knowledge I also co-know and co-affirm myself. This, however, is implicit and unthematic knowledge of myself, not the conceptual and objectifying self-knowledge that may arise on the basis of it. It is knowledge none the less.10 Now if a philosopher tells me that whenever I make the judgment “the sausages are cooked,” I also know and make the judgment “Queen Victoria was ten feet tall,” I believe my response to her will be that however hard I try I simply cannot verify this correlation of noetic acts in my consciousness. Even if I am told that my knowledge of Queen Victoria is unthematic and implicit, I do not believe this will help, since however hard I try I cannot verify this in my consciousness. However, if the philosopher stands at my elbow as I put the finishing touch to the sausages and begins to interrogate me as to what I am or am not conscious of, I will, I think, be able to provide answers. So if I am asked whether I am aware of the criteria of sufficient reason for judging that the sausages are ready is in my conscious awareness, insofar as I am conscious of the coloration of the sausages and the feel of them as I poke them with a fork, I will reply “Yes.” To other questions such as “are you also aware of feeling anxious because at any moment children may burst into the kitchen to see if supper is ready?” or “are you aware of feeling hungry?,” or “are you aware of feeling tired?” I will be able to answer “Yes” or “No,” respectively. I will be able to do so on the basis of the evidence provided by my stream of consciousness. And I will be able to report not only my awareness of “sausages,” “children,” but my conscious attitude to “sausages,” “children.” I will, in other words, be able to give a report of my self-awareness. Moving from that self-consciousness to a report on it, thanks to the maieutic of the intrusive philosopher, I will be able to move from self-consciousness to self-knowledge. The confusion of self-consciousness and self-knowledge found in Rahner is one common among both analytic and continental philosophers. And the attack on the cogency of the idea of introspective self-knowledge when it is conceived in terms of this supposed immediate intuiting of the self is equally widespread. This confused idea of self-knowledge results in the Humean critique of the Cogito, and the subsequent tradition of criticism of introspective knowledge as seen in Nietzsche11, in Wittgenstein’s antiprivate language

10 Rahner, Foundations, pp. 17–19. 11 See Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Translation and Commentary by R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1975), section 16.

Rahner’s Philosophy: A Lonerganian Critique

229

critique and in Derrida’s deconstruction of Husserl’s philosophy.12 All these criticisms are a protest against the idea that there can be an immediate knowledge of self unmediated by words and concepts. I believe, in fact, that Aquinas points us away from such mythical notions of immediate selfknowledge, since he insists that all knowledge for human beings in this life comes about through the mediation of imagery, phantasms, and such phantasms are such items as words, diagrams, symbols and the like. The process of self-knowledge for Aquinas, therefore, is a mediate one in which we move from attention to objects of thought, to our intentional acts of thinking, to potencies or capacities. This classical methodology is one followed by Lonergan as he investigates mind via the investigation of its self-manifestation in common sense, mathematics, science, art, and scholarship. However, such an approach does not end in the relativism found in some philosophies critical of immediate self-knowledge; for definite judgments concerning self-knowledge are possible. As we have seen above, the attempt to gainsay such judgments about the process to knowledge end in incoherence given the evidence of the conscious activities employed in argument itself. There is something “direct” in the process of coming to self-knowledge, but it is not that knowledge itself prior to question and investigation. Rather the data which are the self-conscious activities of knowing provide direct evidence, incontrovertible evidence, for the truth of the affirmation of cognitional and evaluative structure. While it is that data which provides evidence for my positive or negative answers to the questions about what is going on in my flow of consciousness put to me by the philosopher at my elbow, as I hurriedly prepare an evening meal for a pack of ravenous children, it is also the case that such data provides evidence that it is not the case that such self-consciousness is a constant exercise in self-knowledge, in self-reporting. For I can verify in that stream of consciousness my assessment of the readiness of the sausages and my anxiety concerning the approach of the pack of children, but I cannot verify that I am constantly asking questions and issuing judgments, truth claims about this flow of self-consciousness. In the work Spirit in the World Rahner offers a commentary on Aquinas’ position in the Summa concerning the way the human mind necessarily turns to phantasms in order to have insights.13 Rahner’s fundamental philosophical position develops out of his solution to a problem which emerges

12 See Derrida, Jacques, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 61–69. 13 Karl Rahner, S.J., Spirit In The World, Translated by William Dych , S.J., (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968); the text is Summa Theologiae I, Q. 84, A. 7.

230

Insight and Analysis

precisely within this context of Thomist thought. The question is: given that all human knowledge comes about through return to mental imagery, phantasms, how can human persons arrive at metaphysical knowledge which includes suprasensible knowledge? Besides this more general question arising from St. Thomas’ thought, there are also other pressing problems which emerge from certain Thomist theses concerning knowledge which Rahner accepts. Thus, given that in grasping the nature of a thing which is not itself there is an identity between the knower and the known, how can there emerge a differentiation so that the thing known is known as distinct and as finite and limited in various ways? To these questions Rahner offers in response his well-known idea of the Vorgriff, or preapprehension, the implicit preknowledge of being. In chapter 1 of Spirit in the World Rahner elaborates certain fundamental theses which will provide the basis of his hermeneutic of the metaphysics of knowing. Following Heidegger, Rahner argues that being is not alien to human inquiry, but that knowing and being are cognate.14 This is demonstrated by the fact of our questioning regarding being. Even questioning that questioning itself shows we are oriented to being as that which we would and can know. Such arguments in the work make clear that Rahner’s concern is not simply an exegesis of Thomistic texts regarding knowing but that his aim is to develop a philosophy of knowing and human being which is viable in the contemporary philosophical context, a point made by Rahner explicitly in the author’s introduction to the work.15 Now this position on being and knowing is certainly akin to that defended by Lonergan, but once again key differences emerge. Lonergan argues that we have a notion of being, that we intend being as what is to be known by intelligence and reason and that therefore being is the intelligible and reasonable. In knowing my own knowing I demonstrate this awareness, which is an awareness of being able to rule in and rule out some fundamental characteristics as pertaining to being. And the attempt to deny the thesis only demonstrates its truth, for my denial will involve intelligent and reasonable argument as to what is and what is not the case. However, on Rahner’s view I have knowledge of being, rather than conscious intention of being as the intelligent and reasonable. Like knowledge of the self, this knowledge is said to be “implicit” and “unthematic,” but it is characterized as knowledge nonetheless. It is in chapter 1 of Spirit in the World that we also find Rahner adumbrating his fundamental metaphysical view that being is essentially

14 Rahner, Spirit, pp. 57–59. 15 Rahner, Spirit, pp. xlix–lv.

Rahner’s Philosophy: A Lonerganian Critique

231

self-presence; that being and knowing are at root identical. Now the Thomist thesis that in God, the Primary Being, knowing and being are identical certainly makes the thesis seem plausible from the Thomist viewpoint. But the problem in chapter 2 is not so much the thesis in itself but the way Rahner attempts to establish this key metaphysical notion on the basis of which his subsequent analysis of human knowing will be constructed. Given that the work is supposed to be one of constructive philosophy and not simply Thomist exegesis it is the lack of any real argument for the idea of being as self-presence that is problematic. The nearest Rahner appears to come to offering an argument is to allude to a text in Thomas which would suggest that the intimate interrelation between being and knowing would be unintelligible were the thesis of being as self-presence denied.16 But much more in the way of argument is needed to substantiate such a key Rahnerian thesis than simply the assertion of a Thomistic thesis. In fact, this is, I believe, quite characteristic of the methodology of the work as a whole. At what are crucial stages in the argument, we are often provided with an axiom of Thomistic or supposed Thomistic provenance in a somewhat questionbegging manner. For it is just such metaphysical axioms which require justification in a work of philosophy in dialog with contemporary thought. It is the strength of Lonergan’s position that it attempts to do what Rahner’s work does not: to provide justification for the metaphysical positions taken in a systematic way by reference to the data of consciousness as providing evidence for these positions. To substantiate the claim that at root being is self-presence in the sense of the identity between knower and known, therefore, one would need at this stage to advance to an argument for God’s existence and argue that in God, the Primary Being, being and knowing are identical. One could then proceed to argue that the relation between human knowing and being, the isomorphism between being and knowing, is rendered intelligible by God as the explanation of that isomorphism. However, Rahner does not attempt to argue in this way. In fact when he does argue for our knowledge of God’s existence later in the work the argument is problematic, since that knowledge is once again said to be implicit and nonobjectified. Thus, knowledge of God, like knowledge of being in general and of the self, in particular, are all claimed to be, in the first instance at least, examples of implicit knowledge. A central tenet of Rahner’s philosophy is that the Vorgriff, or preapprehension of being, is what permits knowledge of the metaphysical domain.

16 Rahner, Spirit, p. 60. Rahner refers to Summa Contra Gentiles III, 12.

232

Insight and Analysis

Further, this preapprehension in its transcending movement allows knowledge of the particular thing insofar as the particular entity is seen within the infinite horizon of being. This thesis is used by Rahner to interpret Aquinas’ position on the roles of the agent intellect and possible intellect in the process of the illumination of the phantasm, mental imagery and in the abstraction of the universal concept from the particular. In judgment the universal concept is referred back to the particular, and in this further instance of conversion to phantasm, knowledge is had of the things of the world. Clearly, in discussion of these topics Rahner is investigating data which Lonergan analyses in terms of direct and reflective insight. And the contrast between the two positions could not be more dramatic. A lengthy analysis by way of comparison and contrast between the two positions could, no doubt, be attempted. The shorter route taken here will be to pinpoint ways in which Lonergan’s argument shows itself to be the stronger precisely because of its methodological procedure of identifying psychological facts which clarify just what could be meant by abstraction and rational judgment. If Lonergan’s readers can successfully identify in the data of consciousness the processes of abstraction and of rational affirmation then the metaphysical theses on knowing of Thomistic philosophy may be verified by such readers. However, when Rahner advances such metaphysical notions as that sensibility emanates from spirit as its own medium through which it returns to itself, one is left wondering how such a position is to be verified as correct. Lonergan offers, in the opening sections of Insight, a detailed analysis of the way one may come to verify in one’s conscious activity the movement from conscious insight to conscious conception in the example of the elaboration of the explanatory definition of circularity found in Euclid. Thus, what might be meant by the illumination and disposing of the phantasms for insight can be illustrated by psychological examples which can be verified. We attempt to reproduce Euclid’s definition of a circle as “a series of coplanar points equidistant from the centre,” by asking questions with regard to mental images of such items as wheels, the spokes of which we imagine as now of different lengths, now of identical lengths. In this play of the imagination under the drive of the question in hand, the question as to what is circularity, we can also identify our conscious grasp of the possible and impossible in the situation (e.g., the impossibility of a wheel with spokes of unequal lengths). The insights into the data at hand enable us to move to the conscious elaboration of the explanatory concept of circularity; a concept which can only be arrived at and verified in particular geometrical constructs, but which we can understand is a universal insofar as it can apply to many instances. As was noted above, Lonergan proceeds in the same manner to invite us to verify the

Rahner’s Philosophy: A Lonerganian Critique

233

difference between such explanatory concepts and nominal, or ordinary language concepts, and to identify the difference between concepts and the often-fleeting conscious insights which may not be successfully expressed as concepts. Nothing like this is found in Rahner. On the contrary, the examples of abstracted universals we are given are items such as the color “red.”17 There is no analysis of the distinction between such items as explanatory and nominal definitions and no sense that there might be a distinction to be made between conscious insight and conscious conceptual elaboration. Rather than an attempt to direct our attention to the data of our consciousness there is, on the contrary, the assertion of metaphysical theses concerning intellect and its relation to the other of sensibility. We find such statements as: Insofar as abstraction is conceivable only in a “penetration” of the light of the agent intellect “into” the phantasm, the conversion is logically prior to the abstraction; insofar as the conversion as a conscious, spiritual process already presupposes spiritual knowing, hence an abstraction, the abstraction is prior to the conversion.18

Whatever may be one’s opinion of the worth of such assertions it is the case that in a work of contemporary philosophy the assertion of metaphysical metaphors about intellectual light shining on sensibility to achieve abstraction fails to throw any light on the philosophical issues at hand. In the metaphysical discussion toward the end of Spirit in the World Rahner’s inattention to the psychological facts concerning insight and explanatory definition becomes ever more evident. For the adumbration of the metaphysical thesis concerning sensibility as the emanation from intellect through which intellect comes to itself is motivated in part by an inadequate idea of what abstracted intelligible species could be. Thus, Rahner asserts that he does not wish to interpret Aquinas’ position on the acquisition and retention of species in the intellect in the usual way since, for one thing, it would make no sense of Aquinas’ view that the retained intelligible species, has to be applied once again to the mental imagery to be employed once more by the intellect. Why does Rahner hold this? Because, he informs us, Aquinas would not be arguing that one had to return to the phantasms to consciously employ an already acquired species in this way since the species acquired is already a likeness of the phantasm.19 One can think here,

17 Rahner, Spirit, p. 121. 18 Rahner, Spirit, p. 266. 19 Rahner, Spirit, p. 313ff.

234

Insight and Analysis

perhaps, of Rahner’s example of the abstracted concept of “red.” If one already has acquired the picture of “red” why should one need to return to the picture of red to operate with this concept? It is in such instances that one detects Rahner’s oversight of insight. For an intelligible package such as the explanatory definition of a circle is not itself a picture of any particular circle. Nevertheless, it is only in particular diagrams that it is understood, and to deploy one’s acquired wisdom in geometry one has to return to diagrams to do the work. Let us now turn to reflective insight, or judgment. If what has been said above concerning Rahner’s oversight of direct insight indicates a tendency to picture-thinking in his work, an examination of his inability to give an adequate or sufficiently nuanced account of reasonable affirmation will provide further evidence that his philosophy is caught up in, what is for Lonergan, the original sin of epistemology: the myth that knowing is looking; the representationalism denounced by Rorty, Derrida et al. Rahner’s analysis of judgment is in terms of the synthesis between subject and predicate, and the positing of this synthesis in truth claims about reality. He rejects the Kantian view that judgment cannot arrive at the real for, as we have seen above, he follows Maréchal in deploying against Kant the perennial arguments against skepticism: to claim that we cannot know what is the case is to claim to know that this is the case. This position is certainly well argued. However, what is lacking is an analysis of judgment as the conceptual or verbal expression of a reflective insight. That is, an insight which grasps that the conditions specifying, for instance, the form of a given entity, or the intelligible order of a given situation are in fact fulfilled. This can be illustrated in the case of the self-affirmation of the knower. I understand the terms and relations which are the various conscious acts said to be involved in coming to know and then I go on to grasp that these conditions are actually fulfilled in the data of consciousness. To be more precise, therefore, as Lonergan makes clear, being is intended by us in the process of coming to know and in the judgments we make, not only as the intelligible but also as the reasonable. Lonergan’s analysis in this area helps us to move beyond the representationalism inherent in a thinker like Heidegger, himself a critic of empiricist notions of knowing. Heidegger’s analysis of our uncovering of being in knowing and his views on being itself are a result of an oversight of judgment as expressive of reasonable affirmation.20 Thus the

20 Heidegger’s stress on knowing as disclosing, uncovering being implies an oversight of the knowledge of being had in judgment as a grasp of the virtually unconditioned, as a grasp of sufficient reason. As a result, Heidegger fails to grasp

Rahner’s Philosophy: A Lonerganian Critique

235

nature of affirmation itself makes evident that being is not to be pictured as some infinite sea of “isness,” but is always anticipated by us, and is known by us as the reasonable: it is therefore either contingent being or necessary being in its actuality. It is significant in this regard that Rahner thinks that in God’s knowledge judgment is totally absent, and holds that this is Aquinas’ view.21 This only serves to confirm the view, according to Rahner that the beau ideal of knowing is the self-awareness had in self-presence. Lonergan, on the contrary would argue that not only must we analogically predicate intelligent understanding in God but reasonable affirmation.22 Such affirmation would not be of the kind involved in human objective judgments which involve a process of “division and composition” as entities are distinguished and related. Nor would it involve the conceptual differentiation or verbal expression characteristic of judgment. But it would be akin to the grasp of the virtually unconditioned, of conditions as fulfilled, the grasp of actual existence as reasonable, which provides the cognitional foundations of these subsequent verbal expressions of judgment. Given this estimation of the place of judgment in knowledge it is perhaps not surprising that Rahner holds that in the cases of implicit knowledge such judgment, required for thematic, conceptual knowledge, is absent. But if, as Lonergan argues, truth is only known in reasonable judgment and being is known in such affirmations, how can we make sense of these Rahnerian claims concerning this other kind of implicit knowledge? How can we understand it as knowledge at all? How can we verify in our experience that such knowledge of reality occurs? On the one hand Rahner will claim that these forms of implicit knowledge, about the self, God and being in general are “affirmations,”23 on the other hand he will use language that

that intelligibility is intrinsic to being. So in his 1955–1956 lectures, published as Der Satz vom Grund, (see Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, translated by Reginald Lilly (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991)) he mentions with approval Angelus Silesius’ description of a rose which exists “without why” (35–38, 41), and he states: “. . . ground/reason is missing from being. Ground/ reason remains at a remove from being. Being ‘is’ the abyss in the sense of such a remaining-apart of reason from being” (51; see 111). For Lonergan’s critique of Heidegger’s position see, Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, Philip McShane (ed.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 276–277. 21 Rahner, Spirit, p. 130, note: Rahner refers to texts such as Summa Theologiae I, Q. 14. 22 Lonergan, Insight, p. 658. 23 Rahner, Spirit, p. 181.

236

Insight and Analysis

is explicitly perceptualist to speak of them: such items are “mitgesehen,”24 “seen with” the items of explicit, conceptual knowledge affirmed in judgment. The truth is that since we are told explicit judgments do not occur in such cases the only analogy we have for understanding such cases of “implicit knowledge” is that of conscious experience. But as was argued above, conscious experience does not give us knowledge of reality but data. As Lonergan insists against Leslie Dewart’s view that we can know God by direct awareness, we can have an awareness of a presence of another whom we take to be near us, but to check whether we are deluded or not requires us to intelligently and reasonably assess the data of this awareness.25 Since in our explicit, thematic knowledge of our supposed implicit knowledge we can offer no grounds for saying why such knowledge is certain or probable we have no way to justify the claim that this implicit knowledge is correct knowledge of anything at all. One of the problems Rahner sets out to solve in the light of his position on the transcending movement of the preapprehension of being, has to do with objectivity, with our capacity for “objectification.” This is a problem in Thomist philosophy, Rahner avers, precisely because knowing is primarily identity between knower and known. Therefore, the question is how I establish the object as other if in abstraction there is identity between knowing self and another entity. Rahner’s solution to this is in terms of the process of reditio, of return to self over and against the other which occurs in the process of coming to know. In this process I am ever more self-present and

24 Rahner, Spirit, p. 218. While Rahner is insistent that implicit knowledge of God, as the fullness of being, is not thematic objectified knowledge of God’s existence, the ambiguity inherent in describing this implicit knowledge as, on the one hand, knowledge, as that which we affirm, and, on the other, as that which we are conscious of, is found throughout Spirit in the World. So, for instance, on page 182 he writes, “As does every metaphysical a priori, this ‘implicit simultaneous affirmation’ expresses . . . a certain conscious givenness . . . of what is affirmed.” 25 Lonergan, “The Dehellenization of Dogma,” in A Second Collection (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974), pp. 28–29. It is worth noting in the context of the present discussion that in some respects Gilson is close to Rahner. For Gilson’s contention that we make an “implicit” judgment about being is akin to Rahner’s idea that we have implicit knowledge of being, the self and God. With regard to Rahner’s putative items of implicit knowledge, Lonergan’s response would no doubt be the same as his response to Gilson’s claims for an implicit judgment. “An implicit judgment,” Lonergan remarks, “is a judgment that hasn’t occurred yet.” (Lonergan, Philosophy of God and Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1973), p. 61).

Rahner’s Philosophy: A Lonerganian Critique

237

hence the other is set off against me.26 Rahner is surely correct in highlighting the heightening of my awareness of responsibility and personal involvement which occurs as the knowing process proceeds. In this context Lonergan refers to de la Rochefoucauld’s remark that we are more ready to admit a weakness in our memory than we are a weakness in our judgment.27 For the experience of personal involvement is greater in making judgments than in attempts to recall the past. However, Rahner’s attempt to clarify the issue of objectivity in this way can only contribute to a muddying of the waters. As was remarked above, objective knowledge consists in a series of reasonable judgments to the effect that A is, B is and B is not A. No doubt there is experienced in consciousness a difference between my conscious attention to the microwave and the object of that attention (I might be asking a question about it, or thinking how my life is aesthetically enriched by the machine’s presence in the kitchen). But awareness of difference is not objective knowledge of the relations and distinctions in being. Thus, I am also aware of my hand. But I have reason to think that my hand is mine in a way the microwave is not “mine”; it is not part of me. Affirmations of such objective distinctions and relations are based upon rational consideration of the data of consciousness and of sense. If we now focus our attention upon Rahner’s assertion that we have implicit knowledge of God, further problems stemming from the epistemological deficiencies of his position emerge. In the later Foundations of Christian Faith, Rahner considers the objection to his position that in knowing any entity we at once co-know the existence of God, as the fullness of the preapprehension we have of being, that God could simply be a regulative ideal for us. He counters that since the preapprehension of God is involved in knowing the real, God Himself must be real.28 This is a questionbegging response. For one thing, such items as the principle of noncontradiction and the entertainment of counterfactual scenarios are involved in cases of coming to know, but we cannot conclude therefore that such cognitional items exist as realities. If we move back to the earlier Spirit in the World, we find a more detailed response to such possible objections. Rahner’s position is based on the Thomistic view, he informs us, that the concept of being is of “fullness” or “infinity” of being. When we think of

26 Rahner, Spirit, p. 294. He writes, “The other can be apprehended as other only if the knower . . . is present to itself insofar as it produces this being-other in its striving-towards-itself . . .” 27 Lonergan, Insight, p. 272. 28 Rahner, Foundations, p. 67.

238

Insight and Analysis

merely “this” or “that” limited, finite being we are aware that such limited entities are not the whole of being. Therefore, this awareness, knowledge of the infinity of being, enters into the knowing of any particular being as a constitutive moment in knowing this or that being. Further, this awareness or knowledge of being since it involves knowledge of the “fullness” of being, involves implicit knowledge of God as that fullness of being.29 It is interesting to note that while in the earlier work Rahner maintains that the traditional arguments for God’s existence are still very important,30 although based on this prior knowledge, in the later Foundations the traditional arguments are said to be of very limited value when compared to the implicit knowledge of God’s existence we already possess.31 The first point one can make about this argument is that it takes place on an explicit, conceptual level, in terms of explicit reflection on the implications of what Rahner takes to be theses of Aquinas’ philosophy. Therefore, if the argument as stated in this explicit way is found wanting there is no way we can claim that somehow in the actual implicit knowledge the claim to know God in the preapprehension becomes in some mysterious way more secure or well founded than in the explicit, conceptual presentation Rahner gives. What of the argument in its explicit form? For one thing it appears to tacitly assume, without adverting to it some version of the ontological argument. God, understood as the “fullness of being” must exist, since otherwise He would not be the “fullness of being.” For those like Lonergan who follow Aquinas in thinking that the ontological argument overlooks the place judgment of existence has in knowledge, such a move will be problematic.32 However, the deeper issue has to do once again with method in

29 Rahner, Spirit, p. 181. 30 Rahner, Spirit, pp. 181–182. 31 Rahner, Foundations, pp. 68–71. In this area there appears to be a difference between Rahner’s philosophy and that of Coreth. Coreth writes, “. . . it seems to be more correct not to speak of an immediate knowledge of God but only of an immediate knowledge of the necessary and absolute nature of being. To show that this necessary being is not the finite world of our experience, but only God, who infinitely surpasses this world, requires further steps in our argumentation.” (Emerich Coreth, Metaphysics, translated by J. Donceel, (New York: Herder, 1968), p. 174) Accordingly arguments with more of a traditional appearance to them are important for Coreth, in a way they are not for Rahner, in advancing to explicit knowledge of God as the necessary cause of reality. However, it is clear from the quotation given that there are profound differences between Lonergan’s position and that of Coreth insofar as the latter can speak of knowledge of being. On this, see the article referred to above at note 2. 32 See Lonergan, Insight, pp. 670–671.

Rahner’s Philosophy: A Lonerganian Critique

239

metaphysics. It is all very well to claim that in Thomistic philosophy knowledge of, or awareness of being is prior to knowledge of individual or limited beings, but the philosopher from another tradition will want to know how such a move is substantiated. Could it not be, he or she will argue, that we work up to, cobble together, some concept of “being” through thinking that there is this thing here which has being, and that thing there which has being, and therefore this entity and that entity do not exhaust the whole of what could have being? On this view the claim that there is some prior sea of being into which these limited beings are set afloat like toy boats on a lake will appear an unjustified metaphysical extravagance. The point is that Thomistic dicta about participation in being need justification; they do not themselves constitute self-evident premises in argument. In knowing a particular being I can verify that I am aware that for it to be it must be intelligible (able to be grasped by intelligence and affirmed by reason). On the basis of such verification I can make explicit my conscious intention of being. But one cannot also verify in knowing a particular being that one knows the existence of any other being. On Lonergan’s position one can extrapolate from our intention of being, and limited knowledge of being as the intelligible and reasonable to an idea of being, the idea of a being which would know everything about everything. We cannot thereby conclude to the actual existence of God. Rather we come to affirm the existence of the primary being understood in this way on the basis of an argument akin to the traditional arguments found in Aquinas.33 Lonergan’s argument for the intelligibility of reality is essential if such arguments are to be understood aright, if we are to move beyond representationalist myths concerning causality to understand it as a matter of intelligible dependency, if we are to understand causality in its various forms as an aspect of the intelligibility and reasonableness of being which we cannot deny under pain of self-referential incoherence. However, since it remains true that in this life our intellectual knowledge of God is a matter of assenting to true, if analogically nuanced judgments expressed in propositions, it also remains the case that such knowledge is not had in self-conscious awareness alone, but through the contributions of self-consciousness, together with the critical activities of our intelligence and reason. Without those latter activities we do not know anything about being, reality at all. That is, we do not know anything in the sense of “knowing” over which we have any critical control. As Lonergan remarks, Plotinus may have wanted to make assertions about his vision of the “One,” but for his part,

33 See Lonergan, Insight, pp. 646–657, 677–678.

240

Insight and Analysis

and I would add for my part, it is not possible to do other than assess what being comprises other than through one’s intelligent and reasonable operations.34

2. Issues in Anthropology Reference was made above to a number of theologians who have found aspects of Rahner’s work in such areas as Christology and Trinitarian theology questionable insofar as these emerge from a philosophical position which they argue is itself problematic. Both Rahner and Lonergan deploy insights and approaches from their philosophical work in the elaboration of their theological positions. In the final part of this chapter I wish to draw attention to a difference between the two thinkers in the area of anthropology which has implications for theology.35 The issue is that of the possibility of making philosophical sense of the idea of a human soul which survives after death. In Spirit in the World we see that Rahner is insistent on the “unity” of spirit and sensibility or materiality, while granting the intelligibility of the notion of separate substances, like angels and the spiritual nature of God. Rahner’s thesis of the relative “intensity in being” evident in different beings is an allusion to the Thomist doctrine that as one “ascends in being” the admixture of potency and act diminishes, and therefore in God there is no potency and so, clearly, no materiality. In his writing of a later period, however, there emerged the theses which were to have controversial implications for dogmatic theology in the area of eschatology. These included Rahner’s contention that given the Thomist insistence on body and soul as a unity there must occur immediate resurrection, and his speculative

34 Lonergan, Insight, p. 328. 35 Besides the anthropological issue to be treated here one may observe the way Rahner’s philosophy has influenced debates concerning the so-called fundamental option in moral theology. For a telling critique of Rahner’s views in this regard, views which have influenced E. Fuchs among others, see Joseph Boyle Jr., “Freedom, the Human Person, and Human Action,” in William May (ed.), Principles of Catholic Moral Life (Chicago, IL: Franciscan Herald Press, 1980), pp. 237–266. Boyle draws attention to the incoherent position adumbrated by Rahner who argues that there are some aspects of consciousness that we cannot explicitly know. How, given this premise Boyle asks, does Rahner know that there are such?

Rahner’s Philosophy: A Lonerganian Critique

241

hypothesis that such resurrection might imply that the whole world becomes a kind of “body” for the persisting individual at death.36 Clearly, one motive in Rahner’s writing on such issues at this time was apologetic insofar as he wished to avoid any idea that Christian anthropology was Platonist or dualistic, and to affirm that Christianity is not an antiworldly religion of escape into the beyond. The insistence on the unity of spirit and matter in the human person is an insistence on the commitment of the Christian to the future of this world as created by God. Whatever one may think of these apologetic motives, however, the question can be raised as to how cogent Rahner’s later views on spirit and matter, and life after death are. To begin with, we may consider speculations concerning the way in the immediate resurrection at death the whole world or cosmos become my body. Far from distancing us from Platonism such ideas appear to support an extreme form of Platonic or dualist view of body and soul. For if the whole cosmos can be my body at death and your body at death this seems to imply that many souls can share the same body: a view cognate with dualistic philosophies of the body as a receptacle of possibly many souls. If one were to speculate about some possible restriction of some aspect or part of the cosmos to each individual spirit, things would be no better. For this would imply that the relation between body and soul is such that anything could be my body, or the body of a human soul: anything, that is, from saucepans to Saturn, from solar systems to software. Such “ghost in the machine” views of the body/soul composite are far from a hylemorphic view which would reason from, among other things, the dependency of the knowing process upon the psychosomatic features that we have as human beings to the intimate relation obtaining between human knowing, willing and loving, and the physical aspects of human being known in terms of the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and sensitive psychology. Given Rahner’s insistence upon the unity of spirit and matter the further philosophical question is whether he provides any justification for thinking that there are indeed two distinct ontological categories. There can be a tendency in Christian philosophical writing, a tendency one can witness in some phenomenological and personalist approaches, to write of “spirit”

36 For Rahner’s position see his On the Theology of Death (New York: Seabury Press, 1961); “The Unity of Spirit and Matter in the Christian Understanding of Faith,” in Theological Investigations, Vol. 6, (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1969), pp. 153–177; “Ideas for a Theology of Death,” in Theological Investigations, Vol. 13, (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1975 ), pp. 169–186; “The Intermediate State,” in Theological Investigations, Vol. 17, (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1981 ), pp. 114–124.

242

Insight and Analysis

as if it were self-evident that one is referring to an ontological category distinct from the physical or material. Christian thinkers, however, need to be aware of a temptation to metaphysical autosuggestion in this regard. One has to acknowledge that there are very sophisticated materialists and physicalists in the world of philosophy today, and as one can witness in the debates between philosophers such as Dennett, Searle, the Churchlands and Sydney Hook, among others, contemporary physicalists are prepared to admit all manner of subtle mental, emotional and intentional acts and states and yet still insist that these can be physical. At the very least these philosophers deserve answers to questions such as “what is the category of the spiritual?”, “how can a case be made for there being such?” Further, agnostic philosophers of religion such as Anthony Flew quite rightly argue that if a reasoned case cannot be made for the distinction between spirit and matter in human beings, then philosophical theism has no justification for applying a concept of spirit, which it has in no other way explained, to God.37 In his discussion of spirit and matter in Theological Investigations, Vol. 6, Rahner makes the valid point that materialists cannot simply presume that their position is established a priori and ask for a subsequent justification of the notion of spirit. What materiality is has to be argued for philosophically and cannot be presumed.38 While this is a valid point in itself it does not constitute an argument for an ontological, explanatory distinction between spirit and matter, and in fact without such further argument it can invite a tu quoque response of the physicalist philosopher to Rahner: where in Rahner’s argument is there a justification of the ontological category of spirit? In the earlier work Spirit in the World, the idea is conveyed that “spirit” is precisely that aspect of the human person that knows and is oriented to the infinite. But again, the physicalist philosopher may ask how this position is justified: how does one know that physical operations cannot perform this kind of thinking? The truth is that Rahner tends to straddle the issues when it comes to making a philosophical case for their being an explanatory distinction between the spiritual and material. It is all very well, especially in the context of the kind of Christian apologetic Rahner is concerned with, to stress repeatedly the union between spirit and matter, and the intimate relation between them in the human person such that there can be no separation at death, but in the absence of any real philosophical argument that there are such distinct ontological categories, such insistence cannot but increase the suspicions of the skeptical philosopher that no such philosophical distinction can be justified.

37 See Anthony Flew, God and Philosophy (London: Hutchinson, 1966). 38 Rahner, Theological Investigations, Vol. 6, p. 164.

Rahner’s Philosophy: A Lonerganian Critique

243

From the viewpoint of Lonergan’s philosophy these problems in Rahner’s thought stem once again from a lack of appreciation for the psychological facts pertaining to insight. There is no suggestion in Lonergan’s thought that the Thomistic notion of the existence of the separate soul, deficient as that mode of existence is, is unintelligible. On the contrary, in Insight Lonergan avers that one may provide cogent philosophical reasons for the immortality of the soul apart from knowing this through revealed religion.39 Lonergan provides an initial idea of the way human spirituality may be differentiated from materiality by designating the intellectual, rational and responsible activities of the human person as the “intelligent intelligible” in contrast to the other nonrational entities we encounter in the world which are merely “intelligible.” However, he affirms that more is needed by way of argument to show that the categories of spirit, on the one hand, and the spatiotemporal empirical, or material, on the other, are truly distinct ontological categories.40 The argument is that whereas any of the nonrational entities we come to know in the world is constituted and intrinsically conditioned by the empirical, our knowing activities, our insights, are not intrinsically conditioned by the empirical or materiality. For insight abstracts or prescinds from the empirical. Direct insight is conditioned to some extent by materiality for insight is typically into sensitive imagery (although it can also be into intentional acts themselves). However, this conditioning is not intrinsic to direct insight for it is intrinsically conditioned by intelligence in act which prescinds from the empirical. Reflective insight, judgment, is similarly intrinsically conditioned not by sensible presentations, which do, typically, provide evidence for a reasoned affirmation, but by our rational capacity to grasp sufficient reason.41 The way direct insight abstracts from the empirical, spatiotemporal domain, and is therefore not intrinsically conditioned by it as are the spatiotemporal entities we come to know in the world, is best illustrated in psychological examples of explanatory definition such as the example of the definition of circularity in Euclid. Thus, if, to use an image from Wittgenstein, God were to “look into my head,” when I understand the definition of circularity as “a series of coplanar points equidistant from the centre,” the fact that He might see or not see images of circles would be irrelevant. For the understanding, the definition is not some further picturing of circles but an intelligent grasp of a definition relevant to all circles. In the definition one even prescinds from limiting one’s reference to circles of any

39 Lonergan, Insight, p. 725. 40 Lonergan, Insight, pp. 514–517. 41 Lonergan, Insight, pp. 517–518.

244

Insight and Analysis

particular size. But circles cannot actually exist without certain dimensions, sizes. So the definition is not a further instance of a spatiotemporal entity but is precisely apart from spatiotemporal dimensions; they are irrelevant to it. Lonergan goes on to argue that since insights are not intrinsically conditioned or constituted by the empirical domain, the ceasing to exist of the empirical which conditions insight externally does not entail the ceasing to exist of insights and the intentional activities of which they are a part.42 Thus the argument is to the effect that the soul (a) insofar as it is spiritual is not intrinsically conditioned by the empirical, material (b), and therefore since (b) is not the ontological cause of (a), (a) can continue to exist even after (b) has ceased to exist. What is important to observe in Lonergan’s argument, when contrasting it with Rahner’s approach, is that the argument for the causal independence of (a) from (b) is at once part of the argument for the ontological differentiation of the material and the spiritual. And it is hard to see how one could make a case for an ontological distinction between matter and spirit in any way which did not argue for such causal independence. To put the issue another way, there appears to be no serious attempt in Rahner’s thought to provide a philosophical argument to show that there are two such distinct ontological categories. There is nothing to stop me labelling all my thoughts, hopes, feelings and decisions about my family holiday as my “holidality,” and thus marking these off from all my other thoughts, hopes, feelings, and decisions. But that in no way establishes some explanatory ontological difference between these mental and affective activities and all my other mental and affective activities. So in the case of Rahner’s discussion of spirit and matter, it is all very well to describe some mental activities, or aspects of activities as “spiritual” and other aspects of my person as “material,” but where is the justification for saying that these are of a different ontological order? Indeed most of Rahner’s energies are devoted to insisting that these two are an inextricable unity and, in his later thought, that the idea of a possibility of separation in an intermediate state is a philosophical nonstarter. It is precisely on the basis of his analysis of the intrinsic independence from the empirical residue of the intelligent intelligible of human thinking and willing that Lonergan advances to an argument that God also can be affirmed to be spiritual.43 In this way Lonergan, I believe, provides a reasoned answer to the questions posed by philosophers such as Anthony Flew: Can one make philosophical sense of the idea of spirit as existing apart from matter? If one cannot do so in the human case how can one do so in

42 Lonergan, Insight, pp. 519–520. 43 Lonergan, Insight, pp. 647–648, 658.

Rahner’s Philosophy: A Lonerganian Critique

245

the case of the Christian idea of God? However, as far as I am aware, Rahner in the period subsequent to his denial of the possibility of the separate existence of the soul provided no systematic or philosophically serious defense of the intelligibility of the notion of nonmaterial spirituality as applied to God. Therefore, I believe Rahner’s inability to mount a cogent philosophical argument in defense of the notion of the spiritual as an ontological category separate from the empirical tends to compromise the intelligibility of the Christian doctrine of God as spiritual, as well as the Catholic belief in such spiritual beings as angels. And in the light of the philosophical criticisms of his position offered here, one hardly need take seriously Rahner’s somewhat imperious assertion that the doctrinal statements regarding the intermediate state must be reinterpreted in the light of his philosophical hermeneutic.44 In this chapter I have highlighted what I take to be some salient deficiencies in Rahner’s basic philosophical position, and I have argued that Lonergan does provide arguments which can be validated on the basis of the data of self-consciousness. Rahner’s metaphysics of knowing often appears as a catena of simple assertions derived, it is claimed, from St. Thomas’ philosophy. There are occasional attempts to justify positions taken against the possible objections of contemporary philosophy but these attempts are sporadic at best. It is Lonergan, rather than Rahner, I contend who is able to deploy St. Thomas’ insights in a fruitful way in the domain of contemporary thought, and that is due to the expeditious method he adopts. Characterizing an essential aspect of that retrieval of the tradition so as to be at the level of our own philosophical times, Lonergan writes, The fact is that my aim is vetera novis augere et perficere. Nor is my procedure haphazard. Basically it is a matter of deriving basic terms and relations from the data of consciousness, of accepting traditional metaphysics in the sense that it is isomorphic with these basic terms and relations, and of rejecting traditional metaphysics in any sense that is not the to-be-known of human cognitional activity.45

44 See Rahner, Theological Investigations, Vol. 13, pp. 175–176. Without naming him, it appears evident that theses condemned in the CDF Letter on Certain Questions Regarding Eschatology, AAS 71 (1979), pp. 939–943, referred to Rahner’s views on the inadmissibility of the intermediate state of the soul after death. Further, the ordinary magisterium has reaffirmed the teaching on the intermediate state in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. See, for instance, teachings on Christ, Our Lady and the final state of the human person: CCC 366; 627–658; 966; 997–1001; 1021–1022. 45 Lonergan, “Bernard Lonergan Responds,” in Philip McShane (ed.), Language, Truth and Meaning (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1972), p. 312.

Epilog In this concluding chapter, I will take the opportunity of offering further reflections and comments arising from the issues discussed in some of the essays included in this book. The essays “Self-refutation and Self-knowledge,” “Übersicht as Oversight” and “Christianity, Interculturality, and Salvation” are, I think, representative of the central concerns of the whole collection which has as its theme the application of Lonergan’s thought to current issues in philosophy and theology with a particular, though not exclusive, emphasis on analytical philosophy. The comments to follow, therefore, will attempt to draw out a little further the implications of Lonergan’s work for these core areas discussed in the essays. In his analysis of the development of symbolic logic in his 1957 Boston College lectures1 Lonergan discusses the role which the semantic paradoxes played in debates over the formulation of logical systems. I think it interesting that Lonergan does not introduce his own use of self-referential arguments into his discussion of the paradoxes. I believe this to be deliberate since, as we have seen in the essay “Self-refutation and Self-knowledge,” Lonergan’s approach to a number of these types of arguments in the development of his philosophy is quite different from the discussion of them which occurs in analytical philosophy. In such discussions there is an oversight, an inattention to the realities of self-conscious cognitional process without which some of these arguments, regarding the paradoxical nature of self-reference, would not even function. Thus, as we saw, the self-referential inconsistency of making the judgment, uttering the proposition as a judgment, “I make no judgments” is only identified insofar as one consciously attends to the reality of the conscious act of judgment being made and thus identifies it as a counterexample to the claim put forward. To identify the inconsistency one has to come to know the occurrence of a real act: a conscious judgment, albeit the nature of which is a “failed judgment,” since the inconsistency involved renders it false. One might think that it would be useful in such discussions to approach Lonergan’s arguments in this vein from the viewpoint of the attempts in twentieth-century analytical philosophy to adumbrate a leveled theory of types, so as to avoid such self-referential problems. Perhaps the development of a hierarchy of ascending object and second-order languages of reference

1 Subsequently published in the volume Phenomenology and Logic: CWL, Vol. 19, McShane, Philip (ed.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).

Epilog

247

would allow one to defeat the moves Lonergan makes or perhaps in some fashion enhance them. Responding to such an idea one has to note that, in the first place, the attempts at adumbrating such theories of types have themselves been beset by problems of self-referential inconsistency. Lonergan himself notes these well-known objections to Russell’s initial attempts.2 To set up, or even consistently think through the idea of the hierarchy Russell proposed involves the inconsistency of making the judgment that “there are no judgments which refer to themselves.” Wittgenstein was well aware that Russell’s attempts to extricate him from the problems of self-referential inconsistency “celebrated” in the Tractatus would not work, since there are self-referential elements which, so to speak, run up and down such hierarchies of reference. The very fact of the inconsistency involved in Russell’s attempt makes clear that one is not going to be able to escape from the self-referential inconsistency of denying that one is a “knower” (in the sense specified in Lonergan’s account of “self-affirmation”) using any such route. The Russell idea runs into contradiction because our intelligence and reason grasp that the “object” of the judgment made is on the same “level” as the objects referred to, “all judgments.” In the same way we spontaneously and inevitably grasp that when we engage in cognitional acts, such as judgments, the contradiction is unavoidable if we attempt to deny that we do. The development of such a hierarchy of object-language and metalanguage will be, “all the way up,” the work of our conscious intelligence and reason, the self-consciously intelligent and reasonable subject present at every stage. Indeed, at the limit, one may have to meet any skeptical questions as to whether and how we are justified in positing this as object level and that as relative meta-level (or the assignment of individuals to one or the other) in terms of the antiskeptical moves which can be verified in arguments grounded on critical self-affirmation. It is perhaps worthwhile observing how one might analyze from the viewpoint of intentionality analysis what happens in one notorious case of recalcitrant self-referential inconsistency. Our attention here will be on conscious self-reference which is overlooked in the usual discussion of such matters. Thus, behind the development of a hierarchy of object and metalanguages lies the insight that the judgment (A) “some judgments do not refer to themselves” cannot be referred to as evidence for itself. On the other

2 See Lonergan, Understanding and Being: CWL, Vol. 5, M. Morelli, E. Morelli, F. E. Crowe, R. Doran, and T. Daly (eds.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 255.

248

Epilog

hand, we consciously grasp that judgments (B) “the curry is too hot” and (C) “the dog is outside” can constitute evidence for the truth of judgment (A): “some judgments do not refer to themselves.” However, were we to attempt to invoke judgment (A) as evidence for its own truth, inconsistency, and thus failure would result. Why? Because in consciously intending (A) in this way would change its nature from a non-self-referring judgment to a self-referring one. Truth is known through judgment. The truth that “there are some judgments which do not refer to themselves” is not self-referentially inconsistent and all and any judgments of the relevant type are evidence for its truth. Even the judgment itself, as long as the intention in making the judgment is not one which intends to include it as evidence for itself via self-reference, thus changing its nature, can be noted to be such evidence by the selfconscious subject making that judgment. Naturally, this cannot be expressed except in a further judgment, which itself is evidence but must be referred to as further evidence in yet another judgment and so on. But what we should note is that the image of some impersonal moving escalator of regressive object and meta reference cannot leave out the reality of the self-conscious intelligent and reasonable subject. It is the subject who consciously avoids formulating judgments in one way, yet is aware of further judgments as evidence for the truth that “some judgments do not refer to themselves,” as his or her thinking progresses. Indeed, the conscious subject can attend to, or intend, these various judgments at one and the same time in consciousness, consciously aware that they must retain a certain character of reference so as not to become inconsistent, but also aware that they may, each one of them, constitute evidence for the truth of the judgment, perhaps expressed earlier perhaps not, that “some judgments do not refer to themselves.” Some issues related to these philosophical discussions have recently appeared in works by Lonergan scholars. Thus, in a stimulating article Greg P. Hodes has taken Michael McCarthy to task for approaching Lonergan’s account of self-appropriation in a way which appears to show the influence of some of the debates over object and metalanguage in analytical philosophy.3 Whether Hodes gives a completely fair overview of what McCarthy has to say on the matter I do not intend to investigate. But given the passage Hodes selects from McCarthy’s groundbreaking book on Lonergan and analytical philosophy I am inclined to agree with his criticism of what

3 Greg P. Hodes (2002), ‘Intentional Structure and the Identity Theory of Knowledge in Bernard Lonergan: A Problem with Rational Self-Affirmation’, International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 4, 437–452.

Epilog

249

McCarthy has to say. McCarthy seems to be suggesting that intentional subjects cannot at one and the same time be both self-present intentional subjects and self-knowing objects of knowledge.4 Hodes’ solution to the questions which McCarthy’s position raises is to outline an account of self-affirmation which appears to suggest that the heightening of consciousness in self-affirmation is the occasion of a coming to be of an identical self-presence of the intelligent and reasonable subject. His proposal, however, is only put forward as a tentative “suggestion” and he realizes that problems appear to emerge for the squaring of his account with anything like the process of rational self-affirmation Lonergan invites us to critically validate. Notably, on Hodes’ view, this self-present identity seems to dispense with the level of experience altogether, for there is nothing prior to it into which our inquiries have insight.5 Hodes’ “suggestion,” which is redolent of Rahner’s self-knowledge via self-presence, is therefore problematic. We can verify that, for instance, self-affirmation occurs through the grasp of sufficient evidence provided by the data of the experience of the cognitional acts themselves. In fact, Lonergan’s self-affirmation project works precisely insofar as we can critically validate it in our own conscious experience as occurring in the way specified. In that sense, Hodes’ “suggestion” in order to be a correct account of self-affirmation would at once be seen by us not to be a mere “suggestion” but as the de facto correct account; in the same way as in verifying Lonergan’s account of the three-leveled self-affirmation is at once a verification of its three-leveled nature. In that sense, for Hodes’ “suggestion” to remain a mere “suggestion” is to show it is not verified as correct and therefore is not a correct account of verified self-affirmation. The problems already emerge, I believe, in Hodes separating out the verification of cognitional process as it occurs in all the other contexts of knowing, on the one hand, from that of the “special case” of self-affirmation, on the other. In the classic texts in which Lonergan invites us to engage in self-affirmation, such as in chapter 11 of Insight, or in the essay “Cognitional Structure,” we do not see the separating of these two domains. Rather, Lonergan invites us to critically verify the account of cognitional process

4 Michael McCarthy, The Crisis of Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990) 234–235. 5 Hodes, pp. 446–447. Hodes begins his exposition by insisting on the importance of the theorem that knowledge is by identity. However, one needs to sound a methodological warning note with regard to this first step. Such epistemological and metaphysical theorems are to be validated through the positions critically validated through self-affirmation. They cannot be presupposed from the start.

250

Epilog

with regard to both the phenomenology of knowing presented in various cases of “first-order” knowing (if we can put it that way) and the “secondorder knowing” of self-affirmation. Thus, self-affirmation does begin with the experience of attending to data in these various realms, of insight and of rational judgment. With this in mind, and recalling what was said above concerning an approach to the theory of types in terms of intentionality analysis, one can, perhaps, find a more satisfactory solution to the problem that Hodes identifies in the passage from McCarthy than that offered by Hodes himself. That fact of reference in self-affirmation to the acting “self-affirmer,” as well as to that same subject as aware of self-conscious intelligent and reasonable operations with regard to other areas of knowing, is most evident perhaps in precisely those moments in the argument which advert to selfreferential consistency or inconsistency. Thus the affirmation “I make no judgments,” or other cognitional acts deployed in any process which attempts to deny the account of cognitional process, is (are) at once grasped by the self-affirmer (or can or should be) as further evidence for the truth of the judgment “I am a knower” (a judgment which makes reference to various activities on the levels of coming to know). On the other hand, the positive judgment “I make judgments” made with reference to various pieces of conscious evidence can also be included as evidence for itself (for the truth it asserts) by the conscious subject making the judgment. Besides the evidence which it itself constitutes for the truth it asserts, such a judgment might also include in its reference prior judgments that affirm the negation of self-inconsistent judgments (denying self-affirmation) that have occurred in the process.6 I turn now to the brief essay on Wittgenstein’s philosophy “Übersicht as Oversight.” This presented a critique of some of the more radical themes in the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein from the perspective of Lonergan’s

6 That certain positive and negative judgments can include reference to themselves is established in an undeniable fashion in self-affirmation. However, since judgment, as a rational “yes” or “no” grasping evidence as sufficient, is the term of a cognitional process, judgments cannot simply or solely be about themselves. Thus, cognitional process throws light upon some of the post-Tarskian debates on self-referring propositions, still very much alive in analytical philosophy (see Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Vol. 2, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 466). The propositions (a) “This is a judgment” or (b) “This is not a judgment” are, therefore, ill-formed as not terminating cognitional processes inquiring into something other than themselves. Thus the truth that (b) is not a judgment is not expressed cognitionally by itself in a proper fashion; rather it is expressed through other, well formed, judgments.

Epilog

251

thought. It argued that there is self-referential inconsistency in arguing that philosophy is no longer possible because ordinary language is alone meaningful, since this is no ordinary language argument. Of course one can keep on insisting that all the later Wittgenstein is doing is simply presenting things we already know from ordinary language in such a way as to dissolve therapeutically the old philosophical debates. For an increasing number of philosophers this line is simply implausible.7 Of course there is a tradition of philosophers claiming that what they are arguing for is simply already ordinary language or common sense. Some philosophers claim that Thomism says nothing really new philosophically but is just common sense. And as E.L. Mascall observes, in his little book Words and Images, Berkeley claimed that his philosophy of esse est percipi is simply ordinary common sense, since the average person will say that they know there is a tree because they see it!8 The fact that there seem to be major oppositions between such “common senses” testifies to the implausibility of such claims to simply say nothing above and beyond what is said by ordinary language. This is not to say that there is no truth in the idea. One can argue, I have no doubt, that there is a philosophy implicit in common sense, but then it takes some argument to render this explicit and to draw out its implications. Such argument will hardly be the sort that can be classified as “ordinary language debate.” The idea that in later works Wittgenstein is clearly taking aim at the kind of philosophical enterprise Lonergan is engaged in meets with the initial difficulty of trying to compare and contrast like with like, if one would deploy Wittgenstein’s critique in the Investigations against Lonergan’s Insight. Such is the variety and detail of Lonergan’s phenomenology of diverse forms of human understanding and knowing that any such proposed critical engagement risks sliding rapidly into caricature, as one attempts to read Lonergan’s philosophy as an item in the traditions with which Wittgenstein was acquainted. In Insight we encounter analyses of such selfconscious intelligent, reasonable, and responsible cognitive phenomena as direct, reflective and inverse insight, commonsense judgment and generalization, explanatory, nominal and implicit definition, heuristic concepts and procedures, understanding of the systematic and nonsystematic, notions as opposed to concepts, analytic propositions and analytical principles of the

7 See Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Vol. 2, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 8 E.L. Mascall, Words and Images: A Study in Theological Discourse (London: Longmans, 1957).

252

Epilog

full, provisional and serial variety. Which, if any of these, as they are characterized by Lonergan, are the subject of criticism in the Investigations? However, one can certainly say that Lonergan’s philosophy would support and make common cause with Wittgenstein in his opposition to some of the philosophical approaches he rejects. Just as Anthony Kenny sees the later Wittgenstein as opposing the metaphysical atomism bound up with the scientism espoused in the earlier Tractatus,9 and as J.N. Findlay helps us to see Wittgenstein’s attack on mental acts as in truth an assault on the crude materialist psychology with which he had been acquainted in Vienna,10 so a student of Lonergan’s thought can understand much of the critique of the Investigations to be directed against what Lonergan criticizes as the conceptualist tradition in philosophy. On Lonergan’s view this tradition, itself but a manifestation of the more pervasive polymorphism inherent in human consciousness, was responsible for obscuring the intellectualist emphases evident in Aristotle’s and Aquinas’ thought. Instead conceptualism identified the philosophical quest with the quest for the certainty of necessity to be had, supposedly, in deductive systems. Thus the analyses of necessity and deduction in Aristotle’s work were taken to be the only lesson of any importance to be learnt from him, and the result was the late medieval nominalist quest for necessities affirmed to be such because of their presence in all possible worlds. The Renaissance systems and those of the seventeenth century which sought certainty in deduction were inspired by advances in geometry and mathematics. Yet by the eighteenth century the writing was on the wall. Perhaps already evident in the work of R. Boscovitch was the realization, certainly becoming clearer by the end of the century, that Euclidean geometry was no longer in a privileged position, and the crisis over deductive certainty and necessity with respect to mathematical foundations increased during the next two centuries. There is some historical irony, then, in the way, following Frege, Russell turned to the new mathematization of logic then underway in order to combat the baneful influence of idealism and its offshoots. Wittgenstein arrives on the scene at just this point in philosophical history. However, the philosophical beau ideal of deductive necessity which the later Wittgenstein labors to deconstruct was, in an overlapping time period, being deconstructed for Lonergan through his reading of Aquinas. In the 1940s Lonergan wrote: “Reasoning was not characterized by Aquinas with a reference

9 Anthony Kenny (1959), “Aquinas and Wittgenstein,” Downside Review, LXXVII. 10 J. N. Findlay, Wittgenstein: A Critique, London: Routledge, 2005.

Epilog

253

to a text on formal logic; it was characterized as the development of understanding . . .”11 In his 1957 lectures on mathematical logic Lonergan already indicates the way in which he sees his own independent work on commonsense knowing in Insight as being in accord with the shift in the analytical philosophy of the day toward ordinary language philosophy as a corrective to earlier attempts to reform ordinary discourse “in the name of logic.”12 Rejecting the attempt of logical positivists and others to identify the true analytical concepts and definitions in ordinary language, in order to separate these out from the surrounding “nonsense,” Lonergan remarks, “ordinary concepts are not the simple, smooth, regular, homogeneous nuggets needed to conform to a mathematical-logical system.” 13 While the tide in analytical philosophy in recent years has turned against a strict Wittgensteinianism, of the “end of philosophy” type, some of the debates which feature in Philosophical Investigations continue to rumble on. The essentialism espoused by Kripke in his account of reference to individuals and natural kinds is opposed by those who think Wittgenstein had a point in denying that we find “essential definitions” everywhere. And those like Timothy Williamson who argue that we can sort out the sorites paradox so as to resolve issues arising from the vagueness of ordinary concepts have still to meet objections coming from the Wittgensteinian attack on trying to define something like, for instance, the concept of “game.”14 I think it significant for our purposes to note that Lonergan’s approach would tend to support the Wittgensteinian objections in such cases. Kripke and his group tend to overlook the fact that scientific natural kind concepts are, according to Lonergan, heuristic concepts and that, given the revisability of science, what we are dealing with in such cases is provisionally analytic principles, not necessary ones. On the vagueness debate Lonergan is quite clear in

11 Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, David Burrell (ed.) (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1967), p. 55. 12 Lonergan refers (see Phenomenology and Logic, p. 92 n. 8) with approval to what J.O. Urmson has to say on the shift from logical positivism to ordinary language philosophy in his book Philosophical Analysis: Its Development between the Two World Wars (London: Oxford University Press, 1956). There is no discussion of the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein in Lonergan’s 1957 lectures, while his earlier views are mentioned. However, Lonergan’s endorsement of the new, ordinary language phase of analytical philosophy, as akin to his own analysis of commonsense knowing, also embraces what he read Urmson, in part 3 of his book, has to say on Wittgenstein’s later position. 13 Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, p. 93. 14 Timothy Williamson, Vagueness (London: Routledge, 1994).

254

Epilog

Insight that the concepts which express our commonsense insights yield only commonsense generalizations. We cannot use an atomic clock to define the length of “moment” in the ordinary language sentence “I’ll be back in a moment.” For words like “moment” are not intended by us in ordinary discourse in a way that lends itself to such a definition. Rather, as Lonergan argues, the person of common sense has an idea of what he or she is prepared to call “an x,” and what he or she is not prepared to call “an x,” and may be hard put to it to define borderline cases.15 One might reflect upon how, on the basis of Lonergan’s philosophy, one could approach the issue of the nondefinability of the concept of a “game,” made famous by Wittgenstein’s discussion in the opening sections of Philosophical Investigations. To begin with one would agree that this is a commonsense concept and is generalized in commonsense understanding in the way I have just described; ruling in or out borderline cases through a grasp of necessary and sufficient conditions is not what commonsense understanding aspires to, on this view. Beyond this one should also reflect in this case on what Lonergan has to say on heuristic concepts and on analogous understanding. It is no wonder that “game” is so difficult to define, since “a game” is the expression of the fundamental anthropological capacity for play. As Lonergan notes, kittens play and thus the ludic attitude is one we share with higher animals. But in the case of human beings intelligence, reason and value will contribute to the specificity of the phenomenon of human play and its expression in games. Lonergan further observes that the freedom from the constraints and demands of mere survival as manifest in play also associate play with the aesthetic pattern of experience.16 I would suggest then, that the approach one should take, given this appreciation of the anthropological breadth of the notions of “play” and “game” would be in terms of the phenomenological tradition initiated by Johan Huizinga’s classic work Homo Ludens.17 Pursuing such a phenomenology one can observe that one can be more specific and say, further, that while human play can express itself in the aesthetic realm, or in jokes or mere fooling around, it can also express itself in the intentionality of “the game.” As the strange (and not uncontroversial) comedy of the film La vita è bella demonstrates, one can “make a game of

15 Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding: CWL, Vol. 3, F.E. Crowe and R. Doran (eds.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), p. 313. 16 Insight, p. 208. 17 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: Man the Player, translated by R.F.C. Hull, (Boston, MA: Beacon Books, 1950).

Epilog

255

anything.” It might seem that to be a game there must be an intelligible pattern of rules. But even this may be too restrictive, if understood in the wrong way. Thus, if I am playing a game with my dog, each of us trying to get possession of a ball, there may be no set rules for achieving the end; there could be some implicit rules intrinsic to it being a game, however, such as “there must be no ‘serious’ struggle or violence.” In general perhaps one can say that the fundamental rule of a game is simply the basic ludic rule of “let’s see if I (we) can achieve x” where the end is a ludic goal. This ludic goal can be aimed at in addition to other goals realized by the same activity. This allows for “serious” elements to enter into a game situation (in the “Roman games” people fought for their lives). To be a game the activity has to have some point of origin in the intentionality of “playing in order to attain a playful end.” Such reflections show why it would be difficult to pin down the nature of the game in any more specific way. But this “showing why” is not the negation of philosophical reflection but is rather a result of it. The understanding we might achieve through such phenomenological analysis manifests something of what Lonergan means by the open-ended, but not wholly unspecified, notion of the heuristic concept. It also manifests truly analogous thinking. For given the breadth of the notion of “game,” stemming from its anthropological origin, a heuristic concept of the game is not one through which we should ever expect to provide knowledge of all and every game, in the way we might think that science could, in theory, come to an end in its investigation of what is the nature of “fire.” Yet a successful phenomenological analysis may well achieve some modest results, some insights into why we are prepared to call some things games and why we would deny this name to other items. While the Wittgensteinian critique of the attempt to find explanatory definitions everywhere in discourse would be supported in such cases, it would be so because of the analysis of the types of understanding carried out in Lonergan’s lengthy and detailed phenomenology. As I have said above, a parallel kind of philosophical phenomenology is, in fact, evident in Wittgenstein as integral to his critique of other views, but given his avowed purposes this cannot be prolonged or rendered too evident in his text—that would tend to give that game away! Lonergan does, of course, show the role which explanatory definition plays in human understanding and knowing. The account of Euclid’s definition of a circle is a case in point, as is the explanatory knowledge one can acquire of one’s own cognitional and evaluative conscious process. This self-knowledge is open to further development but not radical revision since one can critically verify it under pain of inconsistency. Explanation means arriving at types of intelligibility immanent in

256

Epilog

data, including the formal intelligibility which understands why an x is as it is, in terms of mutually defining terms and relations. In our knowing we can aspire to know such terms and relations, which are characteristic of the thing as independent of our practical motives and concerns; as independent, therefore, of the descriptive language regarding the same object which arises from such ordinary language. Although these criteria of explanatory knowledge can be established in such cases, one then has to go on to speak in terms of heuristic anticipation of similar results being obtained in the sciences, since science is on its way to the goal of completion. However, we can say some scientific results give us truly probable knowledge of reality (some being more probable than others). Without this nuanced analysis of the heuristics of science, and of other cognitive disciplines, one risks either overstating the case, as in Kripkean essentialism, which speaks as if science had arrived at its final goal, or of drifting into total skepticism about all our human ongoing cognitive endeavors. The writings of the later Wittgenstein seem to opt for this second path and even among those who adhere to the thought of his later period some express reservations concerning his luddite relativism with regard to scientific rationality.18 Before turning to some theological points in Lonergan’s work I would like to mention an area of recent work in analytical philosophy which, I believe, offers the prospect of fruitful dialog and debate with Lonergan’s thought. “Virtue epistemology” is considered as having been launched as a new research program in analytical circles by Ernest Sosa in the 1980s.19 I see it as a last phase in the liberation of analytical philosophy from the understandable suspicion of psychologism in epistemology and philosophy of mind which characterized early analytical philosophy under the influence of Frege. Virtue epistemology attempts to situate epistemological questions within the wider context of the role played by the individual, who is at once social, in coming to know. It attempts to understand the links between the moral development of the human subject and his or her cognitive activities and developing dispositions. Others who have made notable contributions to this field recently include John Greco, who has corrected some of Sosa’s overly “psychologistic” notions, and Linda Zagzebski, whose pioneering

18 I recall Kai Nielsen, for a time my Ph.D. supervisor, admitting to me that he found this aspect of the later Wittgenstein problematic. 19 Ernest Sosa, Knowledge in Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Epilog

257

work has put recent analytical discussions in contact with the manifold resources for this field of investigation to be found in Aristotle’s work.20 Lonergan sums up his own view of the anthropological unity which obtains between knowledge and the development of the human subject in the maxim: “Objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity.”21 Those who know Lonergan’s philosophy will also be aware that such a maxim is but the tip of the iceberg. The way that in all Lonergan’s work epistemology is contextualized within the larger whole of an account of the development or decline of human social subjects is quite evident. The fact that he places cognitional analysis prior to epistemology, a fact conditioned by his appropriation of the tradition of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, entails that epistemological questions are to be approached through the selfappropriation of the existential subject. Traditionally analytical philosophers would, no doubt, have had a hard time in understanding how and why Lonergan takes this approach. But the new work going on in virtue epistemology gives reason to hope for an openness to such a methodological procedure. One of the principle themes of the essay “Christianity, Interculturality, and Salvation” is the importance for a number of areas of current theological investigation of Lonergan’s writing on, what he terms, “Christian realism.” In the essay, I argued that Lonergan’s thesis is an immensely rich resource for thinking through the implications of the Catholic Christian worldview for theological discussions of Christianity and culture, Christianity and history. The upshot of Lonergan’s position is that there is a “specifically” Christian anthropology, metaphysics, and epistemology where the specificity has to do not with a denial of the universality of these philosophical perspectives but, rather, pertains to the dynamics of the cultural and historical process brought about through Christian Revelation and the continuation of Christ’s presence in the world through His mystical body, the Church. I also highlighted the way we have to see Lonergan’s remarks on cultures as empirical (as opposed to the classicist view) within the wider context of his thinking on the normativity inherent in the Christian worldview. This worldview is God’s gift to be embraced as true liberation by all human beings, but at the same time it is mediated through the particular cultural

20 Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); John Greco (1993), “Virtues and Vices of Virtue Epistemology,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 23: 413–432. 21 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1971), p. 265.

258

Epilog

“subjects,” persons in community, who have already embraced it and attempt, through God’s grace, to live in its light and communicate it to others. This worldview is encountered and embraced by us in the intersubjective encounter with and embrace of the Son of God. I would like to offer a few additional observations on some of the implications of these themes in Lonergan’s writing. It is clear that, on Lonergan’s view, the history of dogma is a vector, a positive catalyst in general cultural history. Theology is the mediation that occurs between a faith and culture and, at the same time, the doctrines of Christian faith have been meanings which have dynamically formed and affected cultural history. Meaning is, as Lonergan points out, cognitive, constitutive, and effective.22 As such the meanings and values expressed in the truths of faith have played a crucial role in the mutual self-mediation which is the process of the development of persons in community. The implications of the epistemological, anthropological, and metaphysical perspectives of the Christian worldview, present in the foundational revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ, have unfolded through the process of dogmatic development in history. One can notice in Lonergan’s writings from the 1950s on indications of the way he labored to communicate to his students something of the breadth and depth of such a vision – a vision which would integrate, rather than place in opposition, the concerns of the existential subject, on the one hand, and the notion of revealed truth on the other. At the end of his 1972 Gonzaga University lectures he refers to the work of the Catholic personalist philosopher Maurice Nédoncelle, on the authentic development of persons, in the context of speaking about the importance of systematic theology and its task of attempting to provide some limited and yet fruitful understanding of the doctrines of faith.23 Perhaps the juxtaposition of these two themes appeared counterintuitive to some of his audience at the time. But Lonergan had been used for some years to the challenge of deconstructing the oppositions growing between “propositional truth” and “the existential concerns of the human subject.” In the inspired closing section of his 1964 essay “Cognitional Structure” he had argued that authentic intersubjectivity is not served by the flight from insight, by a turning away from the call to

22 Method in Theology, pp. 76–81. 23 “Philosophy of God and Theology,” in Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980, CWL: Vol. 17, R. Doran and R.C. Croken (eds.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), p. 211 n. 16.

Epilog

259

the genuine self-transcendence to the true, the good and the objectively lovable.24 Teaching at the Gregorian University in the 1950s and early 1960s he had become used to the problematic antagonism that he had noted in the minds of a good number of students between the “kerygmatic and pastoral” as opposed to the “dogmatic and abstract.” While he admired greatly the subtlety and profundity of the Catholic existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel, he could not but be concerned by the way in which some of his students saw in Marcel a champion of “existential authenticity versus objective truths.”25 The problems for the life of the Church, in teaching, catechesis and liturgy which emerged from this polarization have been only too evident in the years following the Second Vatican Council. The pontificate of John Paul II witnessed an attempt to reintegrate these fundamental anthropological aspects which in modernity and postmodernity are played off one against another. The philosopher-pope sought to outline an integrated vision analogous to that proposed by Lonergan. In a healthy marriage the truths and values regarding the couple and their communion are, for the most part, grasped in insights in the sphere of meaning described by Lonergan as “elemental”; thus, they are communicated in a way analogous to the communication in works of art.26 Nevertheless, in human intercommunion the truths as meanings and the values shared will be at once cognitive as well as effective and constitutive of the relationship. It may be in the tragic breakdown of such a relationship that one will see truths about the marriage formulated in conceptual expressions, perhaps in communication with a third party: “he no longer seems interested in me as he once was” “she does not communicate the things which are important to her, as she once did . . .” Tragedies in the domestic sphere can be mirrored in the wider community. Then, as Lonergan writes, societal breakdown can be manifest in the absence of shared judgments of truth and value: Once a process of dissolution has begun, it is screened by self-deception and it is perpetuated by consistency . . . Increasing dissolution will then be matched by increasing division, incomprehension, suspicion, distrust, hostility, hatred, violence. The body social is torn apart in many ways, and its cultural soul has been rendered incapable of reasonable convictions and responsible commitments.

24 “Cognitional Structure,” in Collection, CWL: Vol. 4, F.E. Crowe, R. Doran, and T. Daly (eds.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), pp. 219–221. 25 Phenomenology and Logic, pp. 227–228. 26 Method in Theology, p. 63.

260

Epilog

For convictions and commitments rest on judgments of fact and judgments of value. Such judgments, in turn, rest largely on beliefs.27

It is significant that this passage on social decline in Method in Theology concerns the decline that occurs because of a failure in religious belief due, ultimately, to a lack of conversion, or to reverses in the ongoing process of conversion. The decline in question then is precisely the negation of the dynamic cultural process Lonergan identifies in his account of the development of dogma and its place in culture. Because human cultures, as they are found at any stage of their existence, are to be understood not only in terms of genetic analysis but through the combination of inverse and direct insights invoked in dialectic, the, for some, unpalatable notion of cultural normativity raises its head again. Lonergan’s “empirical notion” of culture is not some postmodern free for all. On the contrary, the “empirical study” of any culture at any one time will, through both genetic and dialectic analyses, indicate relative strengths and weaknesses in the given culture. The thesis on “the origins of Christian realism” provides the additional analytical heuristic which allows us to make further comparative judgments on stages in the life of a culture and between cultures. In the essay I pointed out that features of our Western culture today seem to fit with a good number of characteristics specified in Lonergan’s phenomenology of decline and, specifically, decline because of decline in shared key judgments of truth and value. This clearly indicates that I am not advocating an unambiguous eurocentrism in pointing to the cultural normativity criteria which inevitably arise from Lonergan’s thought. Intellectual, moral, and religious ongoing conversions are the operators in authentic personal and cultural development. Christian realism, in its various philosophical dimensions, is the unfolding of the implications of intellectual conversion and without it the processes of both moral and religious conversion will be stymied. For the doctrines accepted in religious conversion will risk inevitable deformation without the worldview which gives them meaning. If an anthropology is presented in Christian realism, then a very promising research program in Lonergan studies may be that of reflecting on such a Christian anthropology, drawing out further the implications of Lonergan’s work. This would at the same time be a theological investigation of further aspects of the nature of doctrinal development and of the historical development of theology in general.

27 Method in Theology, p. 244.

Epilog

261

Fr. Robert Doran’s work is, naturally, very important for such anthropological theology. The work he has done on “psychic conversion,” work contributing to discussion of Lonergan’s phenomenology of our emotional life, has been brought to bear upon thinking through implications of Lonergan’s work on systematic theology.28 Lonergan’s appropriation of a phenomenology of feelings as intentional responses to values certainly has intriguing implications for theology. Giles Mongeau has argued that Doran’s work contributes to a better understanding of how Lonergan’s analysis of feelings may connect with the rhetorical aspects of St. Thomas Aquinas’ thought.29 If this is so, it may help us to appreciate in greater depth some of the factors operative in the history of theology and in doctrinal development. It is well known that Lonergan believed there was a decline in theology after St. Thomas, as the baneful influence of nominalism and conceptualism prevailed. This, on his view, did not prevent Vatican I from retrieving the authentically Thomist notion of theological method in its doctrines on faith and reason and their interrelation. However, apart from this caveat it is also noteworthy that Lonergan did not see the whole history of theology after St. Thomas as a downhill path. Interestingly he points to the positive results of theology in this intervening period as often being due to the role of rhetoric in theology.30 If the rhetorical includes the expression not only of intelligence and reasonableness but of “feelings,” as affective apprehensions of value, then research into how such rhetoric was at work in the theological tradition may prove fruitful. For one thing, it might be that the role played by the process of the refinement of feelings in the development of the dogmas concerning Our Lady, which Lonergan indicates, could be generalized.31 Is one also able to detect forms of argument occurring in other cases of doctrinal development which also make the rhetorical appeal to the value of affirming x or denying y? If, as Lonergan maintains, the rhetorical form

28 See, among other works, Robert M. Doran, What is Systematic Theology? (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); Psychic Conversion and Theological Foundations (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2006). 29 Gilles Mongeau, “Bernard Lonergan as Interpreter of Thomas Aquinas,” in The Realms of Insight: Bernard Lonergan and Philosophy, João J. Vila-Chã (ed.), Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, 63, 2007: 1049–1069. 30 Lonergan, “Philosophy and Theology,” A Second Collection (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974), pp. 193–208, 197. 31 Method in Theology, p. 320. It is instructive to read Lonergan’s own contribution to the debate, prior to the 1950 definition, on the definability of the dogma of the Assumption of Our Lady in the light of these later remarks in Method. See “The Assumption and Theology” in Collection.

262

Epilog

of debate contributed to positive developments in theology one should expect that this would be the case. If this is so, then one can appreciate further the role which Christian liturgy and art have played in doctrinal development – a role highlighted in Newman’s notion of the “consultation of the faithful.” Such a perspective could also enrich the analyses of historical processes, at once both cultural and doctrinal, that emerge from Lonergan’s thesis on “Christian realism.” The dialectical aspect of Lonergan’s Christian realism indicates the manner in which the polymorphism of human consciousness, manifest in various philosophical positions, is at the root of the heretical tendencies which resisted and continue to resist the divinely revealed truths expressed in the dogmas. Extending this analysis into the area of feelings one can say that, if the refinement of feelings plays a role in the authentic development of dogma, then the reverse process will manifest itself in a resistance to the values expressed in these truths and values. Again, the issue of normativity cannot be dodged. One is claiming on this view that some shared cultural feelings are better than others, more refined than others, and therefore one is making claims concerning stages of improvement in the cultural history of human sensibility. That feelings, as intentional responses to values, play a crucial role in the authentic development of the faith community of the Church seems evident when we look at the history of art and liturgy. Such feelings apprehend and promote the meanings which cognitively, constitutively, and effectively build up the Body of Christ. As Aristotle points out in his Poetics one of the functions of drama is to educate our feelings.32 The drama of the liturgy, as manifesting the Christian cosmos, and as sacramentally effecting its renewal in Christ, has traditionally been such a carrier of meaning, educating our feelings. The recent confusion manifest in Catholic liturgy witnesses to the intimate link obtaining between the feelings cultivated in the Church’s liturgy and the truths and values constitutive of the divinely revealed Christian worldview. For, sadly, there have been too many instances over the last few decades where experiments in liturgy have been allied to a downplaying of, if not the outright denial of, certain truths of faith. Pope Benedict XVI has labored to correct such trends in order to restore again a harmony between the orthodoxy of faith and the orthopraxis of liturgical life.33

32 Aristotle, Poetics, translated by Richard Janko (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), p. 48. 33 One might even consider his Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum as a kind of inverse insight—an insight which pinpoints the fact that the way a trend is heading leads down a blind alley.

Epilog

263

In these essays I have attempted to apply Lonergan’s thought to a variety of issues, ranging from the cogency of proportionalist ethics to the coherence of Badiou’s project, from an assessment John Searle’s anthropology to an evaluation of Rahner’s anonymous Christianity. Throughout I have argued for the effectiveness of the wealth of analytic resources offered by Lonergan’s theology and philosophy. The reader familiar with Lonergan’s thought will have noticed here and there some slight points of disagreement, more often than not these have been matters of emphasis rather than open divergence. I hope and believe that this is not testimony to any slavish discipleship on my part with regard to the twentieth-century Canadian Jesuit. That would be contrary to the intention of Lonergan’s work. Rather, my own attempts to appropriate not only the core positions in Lonergan’s philosophy, but also to work through some of the implications of Lonergan’s other insights, only serve to convince me of their immense value in the world of philosophy and theology. I would, therefore, endorse what Lonergan himself said in an interview at the 1970 International Florida conference on his thought: The word “Lonerganian” has come up in recent days. In a sense there’s no such thing. Because I’m asking people to discover themselves and be themselves. They can arrive at conclusions different from mine on the basis of what they find in themselves. And in that sense it is a way.34

34 “An Interview with Fr. Bernard Lonergan, S.J.,” in A Second Collection, p. 213.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

Alexandrian school, Hindu-Hellenistic cultural exchange 193n38 analytical philosophy 63, 109, 115, 228, 246, 253 Anderson, R. 66n10 Anglo-American philosophy attitude to Lonergan 147 parallels with Asian philosophy debates 200n50 animal consciousness see under consciousness animal knowing, “high” and “low” doctrines 40–6, 47, 50 animal languages 43 animal psychology 48–9 animal reasoning 40, 42, 43, 53, 57–8 “anonymous Christianity” 211, 214, 327n60 Anscombe, G. E. M. 21, 57n4, 66n13, 89n18 anthropology 240–5 Rahner’s & Lonergan’s versions 260–1 anthropomorphism, limitations of 40–1 antibehaviourism, animal psychology 48 anti-realism see also realist of Badiou 131 of Dummett 78, 85, 95–106 antireductionism, animal psychology 22, 48 Apel, K. O. 64 Aquinas, Thomas 39, 43, 47, 58, 119, 153, 171n43, 173, 189n30, 200, 210, 225, 229 on animals 42, 42n1 as a Classicist? (Lonergan) 186–9 De Veritate 6n2, 45, 186n23, 252 Arendt, Hannah 112 Aristotelian-Thomist tradition 36, 39, 153, 154, 159, 222

Aristotle 66, 119, 153, 200, 203, 233, 238, 252, 262n32 “virtuous man” 153n15, 154–5 Armstrong, David 27n4 Artificial Intelligence 25, 26 Asian Bishops, Synod (Rome 1998) 179 Augustine, St 193, 193n39, 194nn40–1, 206n59 awareness, distinct from knowledge 13–14, 25–6, 103n36 Babbage’s calculating machine 26 Badiou, Alain 109–43 antiepistemological philosophy, an 130 see also Barker, Jason Being and Event 109, 142n53 concern for N. African immigrants 110 Deleuze: La claour de l’être 110n3 Ethics 110nn4–5, 110–19, 116n21, 118nn26–9, 119nn30–1, 121n33, 122n34, 124n35, 136n44, 137n45, 139nn47–9, 140n50 on “events” 117, 121 on evil 122, 124–6 on fidelity, his notion 116 L’Être et l’événement: Tome 2, 109, 110n6, 111nn7–8, 112nn9–12, 113nn13–16, 115, 116nn22–3, 128n38, 130n40, 134n41, 135n42 Masifeste pour la philosophie 138n46 on mathematical logic 110 Baker, G. P. 66n14, 67nn16–18, 68n19 Báñez/Molina controversy 173 Barker, Jason 124n36, 128n38, 130, 137n45, 139nn48–9, 209n50 on Wittgenstein 67–8, 67n18, 68n19 Baroque music, Haydn’s breakthrough 115, 141 Barrett, Cyril 69n23

266

Index

Barth, Karl 76, 76n44, 213 Beards, Andrew, background ix comparison between Rahner and Lonergan 232–45 comparison between young son & pet’s conscious behaviour 53 on Dummett 44n2, 78n1 on later Wittgenstein 66–7 on Lonergan on meaning 91n22 on MacIntyre 39–56 on metaphysics 161n1 Method in Metaphysics 78n1, 109n1, 128n39, 141n51 on Nietzsche 58n5 pet Labrador’s conscious behaviour 48–9 pet Labrador’s recognitional capacities 41–2 use of self-knowledge 28–9 use of self-refutation 8, 9–10 behaviourism 24, 71n30 belief types see judgments, types of Bentham, Jeremy 160 Berkeley, George [Bishop] 251 Bernasconi, Robert 113n17 Bernstein, Richard J. 66n11 bioethics 112, 119 Bloor, David 67n12 Bonzon, Roman 99–104, 99nn30–1 Boros, L. 218n75 Boston College lectures (1957), of Lonergan 63n2, 246 Boyle, Joseph 168n38, 171n44, 174n52, 240n35 Broad, C. D. 37 Brown, Peter 193n39, 194n40 Buddhism 180, 207 Burrell, David E. 186n23, 225n9 Butler, B. C. [Bishop] 26, 218n74 camouflage in natural world 45 Cantor, Georg 115, 126, 130, 135, 137 Cartesianism 28, 29, 36, 94 anti-Cartesianism (Searle) 21–8 Cartwright, Richard 124n36 Catechism of the Catholic Church eschatology 245n44 Cavell, Stanley 71n30

Caws, Peter 148n2 Chalcedon, Council of 64, 191, 198 children’s behaviour 43–4, 54 chimpanzees, Ko˝ hler’s work on 53 Chisholm, Roderick 17, 21, 44n2, 57n4 Chomsky, Noam 27, 82–3 Christian realism (Lonergan) 63, 64, 197, 221, 257, 260, 262 Churchlands, the 25, 26 Cicero 184 “classicism” (Lonergan) 181–92 “Cogito”, Hintikka’s analysis of 5–6 Collingwood, R. G. 65n8 conceptual formulation 102, 102n35 Confessions (St Augustine) 72 “conscious agent” 28–35 consciousness 21–38, 202n53, 226, 228, 240n35 animal consciousness 44–5, 47, 50 consequentialism 148n2, 160n27 continental philosophy 109–43, 228 opinions about Lonergan 147 contraception 170–1 Cook, John W. 71n30 Cooke, Vincent M. 67n17 Copernicus, Nicolaus, Wittgenstein on 69n23, 76n46 Coreth, Emerich 222–3, 238n31 Critchley, Simon 113n17 critical realism 85–94 Crowe, Frederick E. 148n3, 157n23, 182nn8–9, 183nn10–11, 195n45, 203n54, 222n3 Crysdale, Cynthia 170n40 Curran, Charles 181n6 Dancy, Jonathan 17 Darwin, Charles, Wittgenstein on 17, 67n23, 76n46 Davidson, Donald 31n23, 40, 80, 88, 165n34, 189n30 Dawson, Christopher 182n8, 221n77 de la Rochefoucauld, F. 237 De Veritate 6n2, 45, 186n23, 252 death 245n44 “deceit” in natural world 45, 47 Deconstructionists 109–10 deductivism, theological 184

Index Deleuze, Gilles 109 Dennett, Daniel 25, 102n35 Derrida, Jacques 77n51, 113, 113n17, 190n32, 229, 229n12 Descartes, Rene 17, 18, 21, 28, 35–7, 42, 66, 87 Dewart, Leslie 85n15, 114n19, 236n25 Dilthey, Wilhelm 71n28, 100 “doctrine of avowals” 24, 24n10 dolphins as “knowing animals” 40–1, 43–5, 57 Donagan, Alan 148n2, 175n52 Doran, R. 102n34, 120n32, 157n23, 261 Dulles [Cardinal] Avery 216n73 Dummett, Michael 44, 44n2, 78n1, 79nn2–3, 81n6, 82nn7–9, 83n10, 84nn11–12, 85nn13–14 anti-realism of 78–85, 94–106 compared with Longeran 78, 79n3 Logical Basis of Metaphysics, the 79n2, 82nn7–8, 83n10, 84n11, 103n36, 104n39, 187n1 Synthese 84n11, 85nn13–14, 103n37 and Wittgenstein 84 Duns Scotus 186, 188 Dyer, George 216n73, 218n75 Eiffel Tower as “unified thing” 125 Einstein, Albert 206 “eliminative materialism” 24 empiricism, problems of 52 “end of philosophy” 77n50, 253, 77n50 Engel, Pascal 142–3, 142n52, 143n54 Enlightenment, the 194 Epistemology (Lonergan) 46 eschatology 240–1, 245n44 ethics 147–76 Euclidean geometry 101, 130, 225, 232, 243, 252 euthanasia 112, 119 evangelization 180, 192–4, 193n38 Evans, Donald 64n4 Evans, Gareth 44n2 “events” (Badiou) 117, 121 evil (Badiou) 117–18, 120–1, 124 “evil genius” (or “deceiver”) 28, 88–9 Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus 208–19

267

fallibilism 135, 135n43, 189n30 Fenton, Joseph 216n73 Feyerabend, Paul 24, 165 Findlay, J. N. 252n10 Finnis, John 148n2, 171n44, 174n52 Flew, A. G. N. 219n76, 242n37 “flight from consciousness” 24 Fodor, Jerry 27 Foucault, Michel 32 Frazer, [Sir] George 70 Frege, Gottlob 80, 82–3, 92, 102 Freud, Sigmund 69n23, 76n45 Frisby, Mark 152, 153n14, 168n38 Fuchs, Josef 168n38 “functionalism” 24–5 “fusion of horizons” 66 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 58, 64, 65, 66n9–11, 67n15, 75, 194n42 Geach, Peter 21 German idealism 31 Gier, Nicholas F. 65n7, 71n27 Gilson, Étienne 236n25 God, argument for His existence 231 Gödel, Kurt 122 Golden Bough, The 70 Gonzaga University lectures (1972), of Lonergan 258 Gramsci, Antonio 75 Greco, John 257n20 Gregorian University 259 Grisez, Germain 148n2, 171n44, 172n47, 174n52, 218n75 Habermas, Ju˝rgen 64, 65, 65n9, 76, 112 Hacker, P. M. S. 66n14, 67n16–19 Halifax Lectures (1958), Lonergan’s 157n23, Hallett, Garth 68n20, 73n36 Hallward, Paul 124n35 Hausman, David M. 163n29 Haydn’s breakthrough in music 115, 141 Heelan, Patrick 92n24 Hegel, Georg W. F. 72–3, 94 historical “turn” 74 Heidegger, Martin 41, 67, 77, 77n52, 202n53, 230, 234n20

268

Index

Herman, Louis, M. 40 Heyting, Arend 80–1 Hindu thought 193n38, 205, 207 Hintikka, Jaakko 3–13 on Aquinas 28n2 on Descartes 5–6 use of self-refutation 6–7, 11, 12 “historical mindedness” (Lonergan) 147–81 Hodes, Greg P. 240–50, 248n3, 249n5 Hook, Sydney 242 Huizinga, Johan 254n17 human consciousness see consciousness Humanae Vitae 170 Hume and Humean concepts 28, 29, 31, 94, 126, 157, 159, 194, 228 on Descartes 28 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 33n26 Hunting of the Snark, The 70 Hurka, Thomas 160n27 Husserl, Edmund 21, 190, 202, 202n53, 229 idealism, German 31 infants, human, prelinguistic reasons for their actions 43 insight 102, 102n35 “instrumentalism” 25 “intentionality as the mark of the mental” 57n4 “interculturality” (Ratzinger) 180 intuitionist logic 180, 180n3, 195 Jaki, Stanley 203 Johnson, Samuel 225 Judaism 113n17 “judgment of value” 150 judgments, types of 44, 45–6, 248, 250n6 Jung, Carl 63 Kant and Kantianism 31, 51, 67, 94, 112, 168, 168n38, 226, 227, 234 Keenan, James F. 168n38 Keller, Helen 169, 215, 217 Kenny, Anthony 21, 42, 44n2, 45, 57, 252n9

Kerr, Fergus 71n49 Kiely, Bartholomew 168n38 knowledge, implicit or explicit 82–3 Ko˝hler, Wolfgang, his work with chimpanzees 53 Koran, the 212 Kripke, Saul 81, 253, 256 Kuhn, Thomas 120 Lacan, Jacques 111 Lakatos, Imre 165 Lamb, Matthew 71n28 “language of the mind” 21 Laudan, Larry 165 Levinas, Emmanuel 113n17, 115, 202n53 Lewis, David 115 linguistic analysis 64, 185 Lonergan, Bernard 10–15, 179–221 on analytical philosophy 63, 63n2 on animal & human consciousness 46–56, 58n5 on awareness 13–14, 15 on “biological pattern” of consciousness 49, 50, 51 Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: Collection 93n27, 100n32, 120n32, 149n3, 170n42, 183nn10–11, 195nn45, 201n51, 202n53, 205n55, 210n66, 259n24 compared to Dummett 90–106 compared to Wittgenstein 63n1 on consciousness see on animal & human consciousness on contraception 169–71, 170n41 contrast with Derrida 77n52 contrast with MacIntyre 189n30 on critical realism 85–106, 113–14 on Descartes 16n1, 85n1 Dialectic 156 early & later writings compared 149–55 on ethics 147–60 on “extroversion”, characteristic of “biological pattern” 49–50 on Heidegger 234n20 on historicism viii

Index Insight 31nn24–7, 73n35, 87n16, 88n17, 91nn21–3, 92n25, 93n26, 117nn24–5, 149–60, 154n17, 157n22, 159n26, 164nn30–2, 165n33, 168n37, 173n49, 196n47, 212n68, 213n69, 222n1, 225n5, 235nn22–3, 237n27, 238n32, 254nn15–16 on insight 224n7 Kerr’s critique of 77nn49–50 on knowledge 13, 15 Language, Truth and Meaning 77n52 lectures (1957) on mathematical logic 63, 63n2 and Mackie 89–90 on meaning 90–1 Method in Theology 74nn39–43, 152n12, 153, 154n18, 155n19, 156n21, 157n24, 169n39, 180n5, 181n6, 182n7, 191n34, 195nn43–4, 197n48, 205n57, 206nn58–9, 214n70, 215nn71–2, 258n22, 259n26, 260n27, 261n31 Origins of Christian Realism, The 203 Phenomenology and Logic 92n24, 114n18, 253nn12–13, 235n20, 246n1, 259n25 Philosophical and Theological Papers 120n32, 258n23 Philosophy of God and Theology 184n14, 236n25 on Rahner 168n38, 222–45, 222n3 Second Collection, A, 114n19, 147n1, 148n4, 150n5, 151nn7–8, 153n14, 182n7, 183nn12–13, 184n17, 185n18, 186n21, 187n24, 191n35, 201n51, 261n30, 263n34 on self knowledge 10–14 on sense experience 52 similarity with Wittgenstein 66n12 on theology’s role viii Third Collection 151n13, 151n25, 154n16, 155n20, 156nn9–11, 166n36, 168n38, 186n22, 198n49, 212n67, 236n25 on truth, different types of 93

269

Understanding and Being 157n23, 205n56, 247n2 use of self-knowledge 10–11, 14, 87–8 use of self-refutation 8, 246 Verbum 225n9, 253n10 Way to Nicea, The 184n16, 196n47, 201nn51–2 Lonergan’s method ix–x Lorenz, Konrad 48 Lo˝with, Karl 67–8 Mach, Ernest 136 McCarthy, Michael 248–50, 249n4 McCormick, Richard 164n32 McDowell, John 58 MacIntyre, Alasdair 39–58, 189n30 After Virtue 39 on animal knowing 39–44 Dependent Rational Animals 39 Three Rival Versions 190n31 Whose Justice? Which Rationality? 39 McShane, Philip 34n27, 92n24, 101n33, 150, 150n6, 168n38, 218n74, 245n45 Mackie, J. L. 3–9, 13, 14–16, 19, 20, 24n10, 89–90 awareness and knowledge 14, 15 Logic and Knowledge 89n19, 95n29 operational prefixes 8, 9 use of self-refutation, his four types 3–4 Magee, Bryan (his interviews) 36, 55n28 Mansini, Guy 191n36, 210n65, 222n4 Maoist-Marxism 110, 119, 120, 125 Marcel, Gabriel 259 Marcuse, Herbert 112 Maréchal, Joseph 222, 234 Marion, J. L. 114n19, 202n53 Marrou, Henri 182n7, 193 Martians 98, 195 Martin, C. B. 57n4 Marxist-Maoist see Maoist-Marxism Mascall, E. L. 251, 251n8 “material” 36 materialism 22–3, 24 mathematical logic, Badiou’s belief about 110

270

Index

Matrix, The (movie) 191 Maxwell, Michael P. 148n30 May, William E. 148n2 meaning, theory of 78–83, 104–6 Meinong, Alexius 169 Melchin, Kenneth 220–1, 255n6, 260n40 metaethics 165–6, 219–21, 243, 249 metaphysics 161–214 Meynell, Hugo 52n14, 63n1, 64, 90, 91, 108n1, 109n12, 203n43 mind, Greek discovery of 74, 185, 204 mind-body problem (Searle) 21, 21n1 “mirroring” 35 Molina, Luis de 173 Moloney, Raymond 332, 210n65, 222n3 Mongeau, Gilles 261n29 Moody, Raymond 37 Moore, G. E. 21, 88 Morelli, E. & M. 102n34, 157n23 Morse, Melvin 37n29 naïve realism 31–2, 32n25, 85n15, 99, 100 natural rights 111–12 naturalism (Searle) 29, 35, 37 Nazism 112, 117–18, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124 “near death” experiences 37, 37n29 Nédoncelle, Maurice 258 neo-behaviourism 78 Newman, [Cardinal] John Henry 191, 195n45, 200 Newton, [Sir] Isaac 183 Nicholas of Autrecourt 190 Nicomachean Ethics 41 Nietzsche and Nietzschists 58, 58n5, 112, 123, 125, 143n54, 228n11 Nineteen Eighty-Four 76n48 nominalist 187–8 “nouvelle théologie” 211 Novak, Response to Professor N. (Lonergan) 152, 153n14, 155, 159 Ockham’s razor 27, 104 Origen, Adamantius 114, 202 Ormerod, Neil 222n5

Orwell, George 76n48 “out of the body” experiences 37 Pascal’s wager 116, 127, 133–7 Pasch, Moritz 101 “Past the Linguistic Turn?” 44n2 Paul, St 193 Peacocke, Christopher 44n2 perceptualism 31 Pfeifer, K. 57n4 Phänomenologie des Geistes 72 phenomenology of human & animal knowing (Lonergan) 49–53 Phillips, D. Z. 71, 71n29, 73n36, 74 “philosophical psychology” 24 “picture thinking” 35–6, 114, 126, 234 Place, U. T. 27n14, 57n4, 114 Plato & Platonists 69, 79, 114, 166, 181n6, 202, 205, 241 Plotinus 239 Pope Benedict XVI 262n33 see also Ratzinger Pope John Paul II, and Gaudium et spes 213 Pope Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris 186–222 Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae 170, 246 Pope Pius X, Pascendi 207 Pope Pius XI 180, 195 Popper, [Sir] Karl 135, 136, 140, 165, 165n34, 189n30, 207 Porter, Jean 163n29 positivists 51, 64, 185 poststructuralists 109 proportionalism 146, 160–9, 148n2 antiproportionalism 163n29 Proust, Marcel 16, 26 Putnam, Hilary 113, 113n17, 165 Quine, W. V. O. 24, 28n28, 31, 36n28, 55–6, 55n3 Rahner, Karl 191, 192n36, 192, 209–10, 209n62, 212–13, 222, 222n3–5, 224n6, 228n10 Foundation in Faith 228, 236n31, 237n28 on insight 227–39

Index Spirit in the World 229–31, 229n13, 230nn14–15, 231n16, 233nn17–19, 235n23, 236n24, 240 Theological Investigations 242n38, 245n41 Ratzinger, Joseph, [Cardinal] 179, 179nn1–2, 193, 195, 208, 208n58, 209nn60–3, 210n64 see also Pope Benedict realism, types of 76, 337–8 realist & anti-realist debates 19 reasoning, human & animal compared 56 reductionism 33–5, 126–7 relativism 165, 179, 236n25, 237n26, 238nn29–30 representationalism 31, 35 Rhees, Rush 72, 74n38 Rhonheimer, Martin 164n32 Romanticism, tragic 72 Rorty, Richard 23, 24, 31, 95,190n32 Ross, David 166n35 Rousseau, Jacques 23 Russell, Bertrand 103n36, 115, 247 Ryle, Gilbert 24 Sala, Giovanni 222n2 “salvation outside the Church” 208–19 scepticism & anti-scepticism see skepticism Scheffler, Samuel 148n2 scholasticism, medieval 74, 194 Schoonenberg, P. 64–5, 191 Scotus, Duns 186, 188 Searle, John 21–38, 44n2, 101, 102n34 on anti-Cartesianism 21–8 on “conscious agent” 28–35 Intentionality 31n21, 102n34 Rediscovery of Mind, The 21nn2–20, 29 on self-knowledge 19 Speech-Acts 21n1 self-knowledge 72, 228 self-refutation 72 Sen, Amartya 148n2 set theory 110, 115, 118, 139 Sharrock, W. 66n10

271

Shoemaker, Sydney 44n2 Sidgwick, Henry 37, 160, 162, 162n28 Sievert, Donald 8 “Sinn und Bedeutung” 80 skepticism & anti-skepticism 23, 25, 28, 31, 66, 110, 166 Slote, Michael 255n2 Smashes 179 Smith, P. Christopher 69n25 Snell, Bruno 75 Soames, Scott 250n6, 251n7 Sosa, David 148n2, 256n19 Stebbins, Michael 171n45, 173n48, 209n6, 210n66 Stoicism 202 Strawson, Peter 109 Suarez & Suarezianism 23, 186 Sullivan, Francis 216n73 Tarski & Tarski formulation of truth 80–1, 250n6 Tertullian 203 Thomist (& Aristotelian) tradition 74, 172n48, 173–4, 173n50, 174n51, 189n30, 222, 261 Thompson, John B. 71n30 truth or falsity 165, 179, 235, 248 Turing machine 26 “two realisms” (Lonergan) 52–3 ˝ bersicht, (Wittgenstein) 63–77 U Unamuno, Miguel de 72n34 Urmson, J. O. 253n12 utilitarianism 148, 161–3 Vatican Council, the First 300, 394 Vatican Council, the Second 206n58 Vertin, Michael 209n65 Voegelin, Eric 196 Voltaire 125 von Hildebrand, Dietrich 170n41 “Vorgriff”, (Rahner) 230 Whitehead, Alfred North 203 Williams, Bernard 148n2 Williamson, Timothy 44n2, 253n14 Winch, Peter 65n6, 73n33

272 Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinianism 18, 57, 63n1, 77n51–2, 78, 83, 84, 94–5, 109, 228, 253 behaviourism, his attitude to 71n30 Culture and Value 76nn44–6 and Derrida 77n51 “doctrine of avowals” 24 later period 24, 63–77, 78, 190n32, 251, 253n12, 256 Lectures and Conversations 76n45–7

Index On Certainty 23, 89n18 on self-knowledge 13, 15 Philosophical Investigations 68n20, 69nn21–2, 70n26, 95n28 religious concerns 72n34, 74, 74nn37–8 Remarks on Frazer’s “Golden Bough” 70, 71n30–1, 72n32 Tractatus 65, 68n20, 79, 247–52 “world of immediacy” 46, 49 Zagzebski, Linda 257n74