An Exigence for the Other: Exploring Intersubjectivity through Lonergan, Levinas, and Girard

by

Brian Leo Bajzek

A Doctoral Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Regis College and the Graduate Centre for Theological Studies of the Toronto School of Theology.

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Theological Studies awarded by Regis College and the University of Toronto.

© Copyright by Brian Leo Bajzek 2018

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An Exigence for the Other: Exploring Intersubjectivity through Lonergan, Levinas, and Girard

Brian Leo Bajzek

Doctor of Philosophy in Theological Studies

Regis College and the University of Toronto

2018

Abstract

This thesis explores intersubjectivity’s often-overlooked impact upon the drama of human

progress, decline, and redemption. First, I establish Bernard Lonergan’s account of

subjectivity and self-transcendence as a base for analyzing intersubjectivity’s integral role in

the operations of consciousness, communal self-constitution, and socio-cultural development.

I then suggest that Emmanuel Levinas offers resources for expanding Lonergan’s account of

intersubjectivity by illustrating its inherent link to an ethics of alterity. Next, I outline René

Girard’s work with acquisitive mimesis, exploring how his writings unmask the many ways

interdividuation and pre-thematic rivalry can distort intersubjectivity, connecting his work to

Lonergan’s account of bias.

Contextualizing the decline resulting from such disorder as a series of crises of meaning, I

argue that John Dadosky’s post-Lonergan development of a fourth stage of meaning provides

necessary resources for overcoming relational crises and decline. I then undertake my own

exploration of the fourth stage of meaning, relating the interdependent principles of alterity

and similarity to intersubjectivity and its role in the healing and elevation of humanity’s

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relational capacities. Lonergan’s Four-Point Hypothesis provides a framework for

understanding and fostering humanity’s cooperation with this healing and elevating love, and

my thesis’ concluding section resources this hypothesis to argue that our principal

participation in God’s meaning in history—the meaning that overcomes evil with love—is

itself an imitative participation in God’s love. This love reintegrates and reorders the “prior

‘we’” of intersubjectivity in conformity with the divine “We” of the Triune God.

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Acknowledgments

This dissertation suggests that the bonds between human beings flow from the gift of God’s

love, and I want to begin by thanking the many people who are gifts in my own life. I am so

profoundly grateful for so much, and to so many. It is impossible for me to acknowledge

everyone who has helped me to write this dissertation, and it is also impossible for me to

express the depth of my gratitude. All the same, I want to give special recognition and thanks

to a few people.

First, I want to thank all of my many teachers, and especially the members of my committee,

whose questions, insights, and support have made this dissertation possible. Second, I want

to thank my director: John Dadosky. Your encouragement and advice have played an

incalculable role in my development, both as a thinker and as a human being. Through your

patience, generosity, and kindness, you have given me an example of the kind of scholar,

teacher, and mentor I hope to become. This dissertation could never have happened without

you. I also want to thank the mentor John and I share: Robert Doran. Bob, your guidance and

friendship have changed me forever. You deserve more gratitude than I can express.

Next, I want to thank my friends, especially Eric Mabry. Our friendship and fellowship give

me proof that grace works through human relationships. I did not come to Toronto expecting

to gain a brother, but I did. I am a better person because I know you.

I owe my most profound debt and deepest thanks to my family. To my Mom, Dad, Matt, and

Emily, all I can say is “thank you.” I hope you know how very much I love you, and how

much your support means to me. As I have grown up, I have become more and more aware

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of just how special our family is. Everything I have and everything I am is because of you.

Next, I want to give my love and thanks to Megen Rependa. You have completely

transformed my life. I thought I knew where that life was headed. I thought I knew a decent

amount about love. I thought I knew a whole lot of things, and then I happened to dance with

a pretty girl at a friend’s wedding, and I realized I had so much left to learn. I could not be

more grateful. I am so excited to see what our future holds.

Finally, I must also express my gratitude to the students, faculty, and staff of Christ the King

Seminary in East Aurora, NY. I am especially grateful to Fr. John Mack, the seminary’s

director of pre-theology. Thank you for your friendship, and for your belief in me. You gave

me my first chance to teach philosophy and theology, and I will never be able to repay you

for trusting me. Learning to understand education as formation has humbled me greatly, and I

am thrilled and honored to begin my full-time career at CKS.

To these, and to the countless more that have made this dissertation possible, I offer my most

heartfelt thanks.

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Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1

A Methodological Clarification ................................................................................... 4

The Structure of the Thesis ......................................................................................... 8

Chapter 1: Lonergan on the Self-Transcending Subject ........................................................... 9

Cognitional Structure and Self-Transcendence ......................................................... 10

“Two Ways of Being Conscious” ............................................................................. 15

Intersubjectivity ......................................................................................................... 19

Intentional Relationality and Community ................................................................. 22

The Dynamic State of Being-in-Love ....................................................................... 25

The Scale of Values ................................................................................................... 29

Chapter 2: A Levinasian Expansion of Lonergan on Intersubjectivity ................................. 35

Responsibility and the Face of the Other .................................................................. 37

The Trace of the Infinite ............................................................................................ 46

Intersubjectivity and Responsibility for the Other: Lonergan and Levinas .............. 51

Chapter 3: Interdividuation, Crisis, Violence, and Decline .................................................... 55

Girard’s Mimetic Theory ........................................................................................... 56

Lonergan on Bias ....................................................................................................... 65

Longer Cycles of Decline .......................................................................................... 72

Anticipating Recovery ............................................................................................... 75

Chapter 4: Meeting these Crises of Meaning ........................................................................... 78

The World Mediated by Meaning ............................................................................. 79

Carriers of Meaning ................................................................................................... 81

Further Elements of Meaning .................................................................................... 88

The Realms and Stages of Meaning .......................................................................... 94

A Fourth Stage of Meaning ..................................................................................... 100

Broaching the Fourth Stage of Meaning ................................................................. 105

Chapter 5: Exploring the Fourth Stage of Meaning .............................................................. 111

Lonergan’s Basic Position on Dialectic .................................................................. 112

Doran’s Further Differentiation ............................................................................... 115

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Alterity and Similarity as Integral Dialectic of Contraries ...................................... 117

Moving Beyond Counterpositions: Levinas’ Epistemology ................................... 121

Knowing the Other: Irreducibility, Exhortation, Self-Transcendence .................... 127

Interpretation and Isomorphism: Advancing an Ontology of Being ....................... 136

Divine Meaning, Otherness, and Being ................................................................... 139

Chapter 6: A Framework for Imitation and Participation: The Four-Point Hypothesis .. 142

The Four-Point Hypothesis ..................................................................................... 143

Trinitarian Background: Processions, Relations, Persons, Missions ...................... 145

Contingent Predication ............................................................................................ 149

Imitation, Participation, and Intersubjectivity ......................................................... 152

Looking Ahead: Healing and Elevating Intersubjectivity ....................................... 160

Chapter 7: Conclusion: Relationality and Redemption ........................................................ 164

Grace, Human Being(s), and the Other ................................................................... 166

Being-in-love is Being-for-the-Other ...................................................................... 172

Relating Horizontal and Vertical Alterity: the Fourth Stage of Meaning

and Illeity ................................................................................................................. 182

Alterity, Similarity, and the Incarnation of Divine Meaning .................................. 186

Concluding Reflection: Redeeming “We” .............................................................. 189

Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 196

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Introduction

[A human being] is an artist. His practicality is part of his dramatic pursuit of dignified living. His aim is not for raw and isolated satisfactions. If he never dreams of disregarding the little matter of food and drink, still what he wants is a sustained succession of varied and artistically transformed acquisitions and attainments. If he never forgets his personal interest, still his person is no Leibnizian monad; for he was born of his parents’ love; he grew and developed in the gravitational field of their affection; he asserted his own independence only to fall in love and provide himself with his own hostages to fortune. As the members of the hive or herd belong together and function together, so too men are social animals, and the primordial basis of their community is not the discovery of an idea but a spontaneous intersubjectivity.1

This quote, which appears in the seventh chapter of Bernard Lonergan’s Insight: A Study of

Human Understanding, profoundly altered the course of my life. As a master’s student at

Marquette University, my initial engagement with Lonergan’s work exposed me to a number

of new resources and horizons. Perhaps the most lasting impact of this encounter, however,

came from the methodical clarity with which he outlined a topic that had long fascinated me:

relationality.

In chapter seven of Insight, Lonergan elucidates the relational matrices foundational to

human progress, connecting this relationality to the subject’s desire to know, and outlining

the disastrous consequences resulting from distortions of these connections. This account of

relationality offers clarity not only on a descriptive level, but in its explanatory account of the

ways human beings are always-already inherently linked, sharing in the highs and lows of the

drama of progress, decline, and recovery. According to Lonergan, this entire process of

human community and its self-constitution “has its obscure origins in intersubjectivity.”2

1 Bernard J.F. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and

Robert M. Doran, 5th Edition, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 237.

2 Ibid., 238.

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As I will outline in the pages that follow, Lonergan’s analysis of intersubjectivity reappears

throughout his career, and the nuances with which he employs the term evolve over time. By

the publication of Method in Theology in 1972, Lonergan begins to describe intersubjectivity

as an always-already-present connection linking human beings together in an irreducible,

foundational relatedness: “Prior to the ‘we’ that results from the mutual love of an ‘I’ and a

‘thou,’ there is the earlier ‘we’ that “precedes the distinction of subjects and survives its

oblivion.”3 This “prior ‘we’” informs all human encounter, and even manifests itself in

spontaneous, pre-reflective aid for other human beings.4

The mention of spontaneous intersubjective aid provides another recurring pattern in

Lonergan’s thought, and—as I will recount in my thesis’ first chapter—brief but intriguing

references to the acts that manifest spontaneous intersubjectivity become a common

occurrence in Lonergan’s writings. “Brief but intriguing” is, in fact, a fitting way to describe

Lonergan’s entire engagement with intersubjectivity, which, despite its frequent appearances

in his writings, never receives an extended treatment of its own. Despite its relative brevity, I

will establish that Lonergan’s work with this sensitive-psychic connection offers as-yet

unexplored resources for a theological analysis of intersubjectivity and its impact upon

human history.5

3 Bernard J.F. Lonergan, Method in Theology, ed. Robert M. Doran and John D. Dadosky, Collected

Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 14 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 56. 4 Ibid., 57. 5 As I will outline in my thesis, Lonergan generally uses the term “intersubjectivity” to refer to the pre-

intentional, sensitive-psychic bonds between all human beings, while he usually employs “interpersonal” to denote the intentionally relational, including all the ways our understanding, judgment, and decision are bound up in the social and communal elements of human life. My own usage of these terms will observe and follow this distinction, which I will explain in Chapter 1.

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In order to explore these insights into intersubjectivity, I will bring Lonergan’s philosophical

and theological anthropology into dialogue with two primary interlocutors: Emmanuel

Levinas and René Girard. Lonergan’s account of subjectivity and self-transcendence

provides a robust base from which to explore relationality, and Levinas offers resources for

expanding Lonergan’s brief account of intersubjectivity by bringing it into dialogue with an

ethics of alterity. Girard’s writings unmask the myriad ways relationality can go awry, and

this work is complementary to Lonergan’s examinations of bias. Each of these thinkers,

therefore, provides an essential component to my project. Together, they present the

resources necessary for a holistic exploration of intersubjectivity.6

Drawing from this unexplored interplay, my thesis will culminate in an articulation of

humanity’s role in the cruciform reversal of relational distortions. Arguing that the

movement of self-transcendence is ordered toward the divine call presented in the face of the

Other, I will utilize Lonergan’s trinitarian theology to establish how the response to this

injunction is itself an imitative participation in the relations at the heart of the immanent

Trinity. Through this relational reorientation, we can most fully meet the ethical exigence

toward alterity, transcending our natural capacities for lovingness, responding to decline in

cooperation with the grace that transfigures our being-in-the-world as being-for-the-Other.

In its engagement with both interconnectedness and alterity, I hope my thesis might

contribute useful theoretical resources for navigating the current intellectual landscape, one

characterized by the polarization, paranoia, and ressentiment that have pushed contemporary

6 Furthermore, while the secondary literature on each of these authors analyzes their individual insights

into intersubjectivity, societal decline, and redemption, no one has constructively connected their three theoretical frameworks.

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relationality to a point of impasse. Meeting these crises will require the charitable

collaboration of a variety of viewpoints, both acknowledging the distinctive volatility of our

time, and contextualizing present conflicts within a fuller historical framework, since

intolerance and enmity are not new phenomena.

My research provides an explanatory account of key factors operative in these crises,

unpacking intersubjectivity’s often-overlooked importance in human beings’ struggles

toward self-transcendence. As underpinning, overarching, and accompanying societal and

cultural development, intersubjectivity is intimately linked to the ways progress can spiral

into decline through bias, totalization, and large-scale deterioration. These malformations can

only be met through the identification of the sources of intersubjective aberrations, fuller

differentiation of the response to alterity, and the self-giving love that cooperates with the

divinely originated solution to decline.

1 A Methodological Clarification

Before beginning my analysis of Lonergan, Levinas, Girard, and their insights into

intersubjectivity, I must establish the limits of my thesis. First, I do not intend to argue that

Lonergan, Levinas, and Girard’s projects are perfectly commensurable. Furthermore, I will

not engage these thinkers’ wide-ranging explorations of questions and concepts beyond the

issues immediately related to their engagement with intersubjectivity. My thesis’ interaction

with Levinas is restricted to his discovery that the subject’s horizon is always informed by an

intersubjective exigence toward the Other, and that this relational responsibility is concretely

re-presented in each particular encounter with the face of the Other, which manifests a divine

imperative toward relational authenticity. Similarly, my engagement with Girard is limited to

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his mimetic theory’s implications for the distortions of intersubjectivity, distortions that

reduce relationality to a series of rivalries and calculating objectifications.

I recognize from the outset that Levinas and Girard’s writings are complex, and that, like all

thinkers, they begin their analyses from within their own, particular philosophical and

theological horizons, which are not entirely commensurate with Lonergan’s. For the purposes

of my thesis, however, the majority of these divergences need not be engaged, as my work in

the pages that follow is neither intended to compare and contrast the entire projects of

Lonergan, Levinas, and Girard, nor to catalogue their varying agreements and disagreements

on any number of topics.7 Instead, I am arguing that Lonergan, Levinas, and Girard each

offer crucial insights into intersubjectivity and its importance for a philosophical and

theological analysis of progress, decline, and redemption. Perfect or overwhelming

methodological agreement between them is not necessary.

Given the aims of my thesis, I must also stress that I will not be employing Lonergan,

Levinas and Girard equally. Their writings do not receive equal real estate in the pages of

this thesis. My operative definition of intersubjectivity is drawn directly from Lonergan. His

understanding of intersubjectivity is the base for all that follows, and so my thesis is

technically a synthetic-constructive expansion of Lonergan’s position on intersubjectivity,

which needs to be bolstered by Levinas’ ethical framework, and Girard’s account of the

7 This does not mean that I will completely prescind from all analysis of the divergences between their

projects (Ch. 5, for example, is largely dedicated to proposing a solution to a key methodological divergence between Lonergan and Levinas), just that the divergences I engage will be restricted to those relevant to an analysis of intersubjectivity.

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many ways intersubjectivity can become disordered. 8 Lonergan’s thought, therefore,

provides the primary scaffolding on which my synthetic-constructive work with

intersubjectivity can take place. My goal is to present the most philosophically and

theologically explanatory account of intersubjectivity and its place in the drama of progress,

decline, and redemption. The relative usage of each of my thesis’ interlocutors is at the

service of this aim. My horizon on intersubjectivity is primarily shaped by Lonergan,

secondarily by Levinas, and then by Girard, but I am employing their thought to treat an

issue that requires the insights of all three thinkers.

The key to my argument is that their positions on intersubjectivity illuminate essential

elements of the “prior ‘we’” of intersubjectivity, its importance, and its implications. My

project is not comparative, but synthetic-constructive. I am interested in advancing each

thinker’s insights into intersubjectivity. While I recognize that there is a great deal of

scholarship examining potential problematics with Lonergan’s writings, Levinas’ writings, or

Girard’s writings, my goal is not to defend their projects as a whole. I will engage secondary

literature that is relevant to the insights into intersubjectivity that I have outlined above, but I

do not intend to exhaustively catalogue the various debates regarding interpretation of any of

my thesis’ three primary interlocutors.

8 Perhaps more precisely, my operative definition of intersubjectivity is the definition I have come to

understand and develop through Lonergan’s writings. This definition diverges from the way(s) many Lonergan scholars understand intersubjectivity, largely because my own reading of Lonergan is so indebted to Robert Doran and John Dadosky. I have come to this definition, not because it is Lonergan’s (or, at the very least, derived from Lonergan’s), but because it is the most explanatory account of intersubjectivity I have encountered, especially when it is supplemented and expanded by engagement with Levinas and Girard. In this sense, the “through” of my thesis’ title indicates that I am exploring and expanding a particular account of intersubjectivity (i.e., Lonergan’s) through insights in various components of Lonergan, Levinas, and Girard’s writings. I must also mention that I am greatly indebted to Tom Reynolds for suggesting the term “synthetic-constructive” as shorthand for my thesis’ methodology. This term quite clearly and succinctly summarizes the aims of my thesis.

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I must also highlight that my thesis, while focusing narrowly on the topic of intersubjectivity,

will also build upon Lonergan’s, Levinas’, and Girard’s foundational accounts of

intersubjectivity, its roots in an ethical obligation, and the many ways this obligation and its

response can be warped or rejected. Lonergan’s trinitarian theology will serve as the

springboard for exploring a solution to these problematics. As no secondary source brings

these three thinkers into dialogue on the topic of intersubjectivity, the primary importance of

my bibliography’s secondary literature is methodological. In this regard, my thesis is

especially influenced by the writings of Robert Doran and John Dadosky.

Both Doran and Dadosky develop Lonergan’s insights, and their projects are not primarily

interpretive, favoring instead a creative, constructive, and original implementation of the

tools Lonergan provides. Following this example, I will draw from Doran’s writings on the

dialectics at play in human history, Dadosky’s suggestion of a fourth stage of meaning, and

their collective writings advancing Lonergan’s Four-Point Hypothesis. The latter hypothesis

will account for the healing and elevation of human relations through grace as participating

in the divine relations. Just as these ideas support Lonergan’s project, but expand beyond his

writings on history, meaning, or Trinitarian theology, I will build upon the resources in

Doran’s and Dadosky’s work in order to offer my own, original contribution to the

conversation. By expanding upon this framework to provide the most fully explanatory

account of intersubjectivity’s place in the drama of progress, decline, and redemption, my

own research will attempt to enter into unexplored territory.

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2 The Structure of the Thesis

This thesis is divided into three major sections. The first of these sections will establish

intersubjectivity’s place in the writings of Lonergan (Chapter 1), Levinas (Chapter 2), and

Girard (Chapter 3), explanatorily engaging these three thinkers’ insights on intersubjectivity

to unpack its integral, often-overlooked role in history. This section will establish that

subjectivity is always-already intersubjective, and that this intersubjectivity has profound

consequences for human history. The second of the thesis’ sections will frame

intersubjectivity within the macro context of meaning in history (Chapter 4), establishing the

ways Lonergan, Levinas, and Girard each help illuminate the movement into a fourth stage of

meaning, relating the interdependent principles of alterity and similarity to intersubjectivity

and its role in the healing and elevation of humanity’s relational capacities (Chapter 5).

The thesis’ third section will propose a theological framework for overcoming relational

decline, using Lonergan’s Four-Point Hypothesis to explore how our principal participation

in God’s meaning in history—the meaning that overcomes evil with love—is itself an

imitative participation in Trinitarian relationality, which heals and elevates intersubjectivity

(Chapter 6). I will conclude my thesis by arguing that through the response to the divine

injunction in the face of the Other, we respond to decline in cooperation with the grace that

transfigures our being-in-the-world as being-for-the-Other. This grace is both healing and

elevating, restoring intersubjective spontaneity by reversing the decline described by Girard

and Lonergan, and heightening our response to the intersubjective exigence toward the Other

described by Levinas (Chapter 7).

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Chapter 1 Lonergan on Self-Transcending Subjectivity

Beginning my analysis of intersubjectivity and its impact upon the drama of human progress,

decline, and redemption, my thesis’ first chapter will provide a foundation from which to

begin my synthetic-constructive task. This chapter’s analysis of self-transcendence,

development, community, and their connections to intersubjectivity begins my thesis’

opening section. The three chapters comprising this section establish intersubjectivity’s place

in the writings of Lonergan, Levinas, and Girard, and use these three thinkers’ insights on

intersubjectivity to unpack its integral, often-overlooked role in history.

As an inherently relational undertaking, human living is complex, and, as the sensitive-

psychic bond linking all human subjects to one another on a pre-thematic, elemental level,

intersubjectivity has wide-ranging, often unforeseen effects on all aspects of this intricate

enterprise. In order to sufficiently consider these processes, I will begin by unpacking

Lonergan’s philosophical and theological anthropology, and intersubjectivity’s place in it. As

I will illustrate, Lonergan’s thought provides a robust base for approaching the mutually

conditioning issues of subjectivity, intersubjective and interpersonal relationality, and the

struggle for authenticity in self-transcendence.1

1 Lonergan generally uses the term “intersubjectivity” to refer to the pre-intentional, spontaneous,

sensitive-psychic bonds between all human beings, while he usually employs “interpersonal” to denote the intentionally relational, including all the ways our understanding, judgment, and decision are bound up in the social and communal elements of human life. Frederick Crowe notes this distinction when he writes, “I [i.e., Frederick Crowe] use the word ‘intersubjectivity’ to refer here to the full range of relations between subjects; this is not, I think, the particular use Lonergan sometimes makes of the term, as when it refers to the intersubjectivity that is ‘vital and functional,’ an intersubjectivity of ‘action and feeling’ (Method in Theology, 57, 59).” As we will see below, with his clarification and expansion of the distinction between the sensitive-psychic and the intellectual-spiritual ways of being conscious, Robert Doran accentuates the importance of making the distinction between the underpinning, overarching, and accompanying relational element (i.e.,

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1 Cognitional Structure and Self-Transcendence

Lonergan’s thought begins by emphasizing the dynamism underlying, conditioning, and

advancing all of Creation. From the smallest quantum occurrences to the most sweeping

interstellar events, the universe is always engaged in “an upwardly but indeterminately

directed dynamism towards ever fuller realization of being.”2 As participants in this

movement, human beings are also always engaging in a process of self-transcendence.3

Ideally, this involves an ever-fuller actualization of subjects’ capacities for inquiry and

engagement with the world around them.4

intersubjectivity), and its correlate in the intellectual spiritual dimension. I also understand Lonergan’s later treatments of subjectivity and relationality to have been impacted by his interactions with Doran and his writings, and Lonergan’s increased emphasis on the role of the psyche in the full range of human living and self-transcendence (exemplified by his shift to the language of “quasi-operator”) corroborates this suggestion. My own usage of the terms “intersubjective” and “interpersonal” will observe and follow Lonergan’s and Doran’s distinction.

2 Insight, 477. 3 Lonergan connects humanity’s cognitional dynamism to the dynamism of Being in the following

terms: “Just as cognitional activity does not know in advance what being is and so has to define it heuristically as whatever is to be known by intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation, so objective process is not the realization of some blueprint but the cumulation of a conditioned series of things and schemes of recurrence in accord with successive schedules of probabilities. Just as cognitional activity is the becoming known of being, so objective process is the becoming of proportionate being. Indeed, since cognitional activity is itself but a part of this universe, so its heading to being is but the particular instance in which universal striving towards being becomes conscious and intelligent and reasonable. Such is the meaning we would attach to the name finality (Insight, 445).

4 For a general introduction to the unfolding of this vertical finality (especially as this movement involves humanity) see Bernard J.F. Lonergan, “Mission and the Spirit,” in A Third Collection, ed. Frederick E. Crowe, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 16 (University of Toronto Press, 2017), 21–33.

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Humanity’s innate inclination toward investigation and interaction is rooted in an

unrestricted desire to know.5 This unrestricted desire orders subjectivity toward the true and

the real, just as questions are ordered toward answers:

This intrinsic relation of the dynamic structure of human knowing to being and so to reality primarily is not pensée pensée hut pensée pensante, not intentio intenta but intentio intendens, not noêma but noêsis. It is the originating drive of human knowing. Consciously, intelligently, rationally it goes beyond: beyond data to intelligibility; beyond intelligibility to truth and through truth to being; and beyond known truth and being to the truth and being still to be known. But though it goes beyond, it does not leave behind. It goes beyond to add, and when it has added, it unites. It is the active principle that calls forth in turn our several cognitional activities.6

These activities form a dynamic, ordered whole: intentional consciousness. The operations of

human knowing intend and attend to objects, and the subject is present to herself and aware

of her own agency as operator.7 The subject experiences herself engaging and interacting

with the world, and each of her consciousness’ operations brings with it a new series of

qualitative differences and actualizations of self-presence. Lonergan distinguishes these

5 As I will outline below, Lonergan uses a number of terms (e.g., unrestricted desire to know, intending

intention of being, the transcendental notions, tidal movement of subjectivity, passionateness of being, etc.) to highlight various characteristics of this desire and its role in orienting and ordering subjectivity. John Dadosky has also emphasized the importance of four fundamental desires Lonergan identifies in his the supplement “On the Redemption,” included in his Latin Christology: “(1) the desire to understand; (2) the desire for rectitude (integrity between knowing and doing); (3) the desire for happiness; and (4) the desire for immortality” (John D. Dadosky, “Desire, Bias, and Love: Revisiting Lonergan’s Philosophical Anthropology,” Irish Theological Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2012): 244–64, at 245–47, citing Bernard Lonergan, De Verbo Incarnato, trans. Charles Hefling (Rome: Gregorian University, 1964). This supplement will be published as Volume 9 of the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan). These terms are all in re reducible to the same drive: the dynamic movement at the core of subjectivity, the natural desire for God. Whether it is thematized or not, this innate longing is the impetus for the entire endeavor of self-transcendence.

6 Bernard J.F. Lonergan, “Cognitional Structure,” in Collection: Papers by Bernard J.F. Lonergan, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 211–12.

7 Method in Theology, 7.

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differences through the metaphor of distinct, interrelated ‘levels’ of consciousness. Together,

these levels constitute the polymorphic structure of cognitional process.8

On the level of experience, the subject interacts with her environment through the senses,

perceiving and imagining, moving through and receiving the myriad sights, smells, tastes,

sounds, and textures of the world. Next, on the level of intelligence, she approaches an

understanding of what she experiences, asking “what?,” “why?,” and “how?,” recognizing

the relations, patterns, unities, and identities immanent in the data, and generating concepts,

definitions, and formulations of these understandings. In a further step, she comes to

reflection, deliberating upon the fruits of her inquiry, and passing judgment on the truth or

falsity of her understanding of the evidence marshaled. Next, her self-transcendence reaches

beyond the order of knowing into the order of doing, and questions for deliberation lead to

judgments of value regarding how the subject will live her life, asserting who she wants to be

through the actions she decides to perform.9

This entire process is driven by the natural, spontaneous desire to know. The undertow of this

pure desire compels the subject to inquire about the world she inhabits, ordering attentiveness

toward intelligence, intelligence toward reasonableness, and reasonableness toward

8 I must stress from the outset that this foundational emphasis on the cognitional operations of the

subject ought not be read as exclusively or even excessively focused on the individual. In fact, the term “individual” is itself something of a misnomer. The subject is always already bound up in communal, social, and cultural contexts and connections. As Paul Kidder argues, “Lonergan finds utter ontological priority in neither the individual nor the community, but rather makes an ontological commitment to their dynamic interrelationship” (Kidder, “Lonergan and the Husserlian Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity,” ed. Mark D. Morelli, Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 4, no. 1 (March 1986): 30, emphasis added). Balancing the subject’s exigences toward authenticity with the shared meanings and self-correction of collaboration, Lonergan’s method is ultimately grounded in the communication and dialogue fostered by interpersonal encounter.

9 Method in Theology, 9.

13

responsibility. The desire’s unrestrictedness is derived precisely from the importance and

scope of questioning, “for there is nothing that we cannot at least question.”10 The operations

of cognitional structure are differentiated, therefore, according to the types of question being

asked:

There are questions for intelligence asking what, why, how, what for. There are questions for reflection asking whether our answers to the previous type of question are true or false, certain or only probable. Finally, there are questions for deliberation, and deliberations are of two kinds: there are the deliberations of the egoist asking what’s in it for me or for us; there are also the deliberations of moral people, who inquire whether the proposed end is a value, whether it is really and truly worth while.11

These four levels (experiencing, understanding, judging, deciding) are related to each other

sequentially through “instances of what Hegel named sublation, of a lower being retained,

preserved, yet transcended and completed by a higher.”12 From experience up through

decision, each of the levels builds upon those preceding it, carrying the contributions of the

previous operations forward to a higher fulfillment. The cumulative unfolding of these

operations allows the subject to transcend her finitude, coming to an objective judgment.

10 “Cognitional Structure,” 211. 11 Bernard J.F. Lonergan, “Reality, Myth, Symbol,” in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965-

1980, ed. Robert C. Croken and Robert M. Doran, 2nd Revised Edition, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 17 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 385–86.

12 Bernard J.F. Lonergan, “The Subject,” in A Second Collection, ed. Robert Doran S.J and John Dadosky, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 13 (University of Toronto Press, 2016), 69. Unlike Hegel’s Aufhebung, however, Lonergan’s understanding of sublation omits “the Hegelian view that the higher reconciles a contradiction in the lower,” and this amendment allows for the possibility of truly mutual dialectical benefit, as the movement to higher synthesis does not entail the violent or destructive implications inherent in the opposition of the Hegelian paradigm of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (Method in Theology, 80).

14

With such a judgment, the subject asserts that, absent the emergence of further relevant

questions or as yet unrecognized data, the conditions for affirming x are fulfilled.13

It is with such an affirmation, Lonergan argues, “[a human being] achieves authenticity in

self-transcendence.”14 In an even further step, the subject who brackets their own “calculus

of the pleasures and pains involved,” making responsible decision by opting “not for the

13 Insight, 305–12. This affirmation is clearly variable in content and context, and it usually happens so

quickly that the subject is barely even aware of the individual steps that occasioned and supported the judgment. The vast majority of our daily judgments are mundane and reflexive enough to occur at an extremely expedited rate. This does not, however, mean that the structure of this process is changed, even if it occurs with remarkable speed. Whether identifying a loved one walking into a room, accepting or rejecting a particular philosopher’s epistemological claims, or solving a highly advanced mathematical equation, the operations of consciousness unfold according to the movement outlined above. Differences in learning style, education, and/or life experience might hinder or help expedite the movement between operations, but this does not alter the fundamental process by which one attains self-transcendence in judgment. The objectivity of such judgments—and the ways Lonergan’s epistemology varies from other common presentations of judgment—will be addressed more fully in Chapter 5.

14 Method in Theology, 104. This understanding of self-transcendence is also the basis of Lonergan’s position on objectivity. According to Lonergan, the majority of post-Cartesian philosophers attribute objectivity to the experience of the object, not the judgment in which the object is affirmed. At the same time, if you asked these philosophers, “Would you consider the typewriter to be an object if you knew it to be true that there was no typewriter?” they would say “No.” But that is a matter of judgment. This example illustrates the tendency to confuse the criteria of objectivity, moving back and forth between sensation and judgment, mistakenly formulating the question of objectivity as something like, “How do I get outside of myself and know what is sensibly ‘out there’ in the real world”? Lonergan argues that this formulation of the question is inherently misleading. It treats an “internal” subject as something divorced from being. It forgets that the one’s own subjectivity is something about which one has already made a judgment (at least an implicit one). My own subjectivity is something all my other judgments presume. This presumption already affirms an object: the self. This selfhood exists within being. It is both and object and a subject. At the same time, we make judgments about countless other objects, and “we contend that [these] other judgments are equally possible and reasonable, so that through experience, inquiry, and reflection there arises knowledge of other objects both as beings and as being other than the knower. Hence we place transcendence, not in going beyond a known knower, but in heading for being, within which there are positive differences and, among such differences, the difference between object and subject. Inasmuch as such judgments occur, there are in fact objectivity and transcendence; and whether or not such judgments are correct is a distinct question to be resolved along the lines reached in the analysis of judgment” (Insight, 401-02). For Lonergan, therefore, knowing is not a matter of going from “in here” to “out there,” but of going from experience through understanding to judgment. This is true whether the reality affirmed in judgment happens to be oneself or anything else. The question of self-transcendence, then, should actually be framed, “How does the subject transcend her finitude in order to come to objectively accurate knowledge of anything, including herself?” For a fuller account of the relationship of subjectivity and objectivity, see Chapters 12 and 13 of Insight.

15

merely apparent good, but for the true good, […] is achieving moral self-transcendence;

[such a person] is existing authentically.”15

Lonergan frames the exhortation to such self-transcending authenticity through the

injunctions he names “transcendental precepts.”16 These precepts compel human beings to

“Be attentive, Be intelligent, Be reasonable, Be responsible.” 17 Prior to any explicit

thematization or linguistic expression, however, these precepts exist concretely “in the

spontaneous, structured dynamism of human consciousness.”18 The subject is even capable

of objectifying, understanding, and reflecting upon this process itself, continually improving

the effectiveness with which these operations recur, growing in self-appropriation and

authenticity, heightening self-awareness.19

2 “Two Ways of Being Conscious”

Returning to the metaphor of levels, we can understand the process of human knowing as a

development from the bottom upward, with each new operation building upon and drawing

15 Ibid., 50. 16 Bernard J.F. Lonergan, “Lecture 3: Philosophy of God and the Functional Specialty ‘Systematics,’”

in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965-1980, ed. Robert C. Croken and Robert M. Doran, 2nd Revised Edition, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 17 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 201.

17 Method in Theology, 20. 18 Ibid. 19 According to Lonergan, this structure of human cognitional process serves as a concrete, normative

base from which to assess the objectivity and authenticity (i.e., the attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility) of a given position, action, etc. This method overcomes the common dichotomization of subjectivity and objectivity, understanding these terms “[not in] the sense of subject-object-in here now, out there now-but in the sense that objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity” (Bernard J.F. Lonergan, “An Interview with Fr. Bernard Lonergan, S.J.,” in A Second Collection, ed. Robert Doran S.J and John Dadosky, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 13 (University of Toronto Press, 2016), 180). Such “authentic subjectivity [is] the result of raising and answering all relevant questions for intelligence, for reflection, and for deliberation” (“Reality, Myth, Symbol,” 389). The method that reflects upon this dynamic process’ “data of consciousness” (i.e., the operations of intentional consciousness objectified) asks, “What am I doing when I am knowing? Why is doing that knowing? What do I know when I do it?’ (Insight, 779). For a thorough overview of Lonergan’s cognitional theory, see Lonergan, “Cognitional Structure,” 205–21.

16

from the scaffolding laid by the previous questions and operations. The structure of these

sublative levels is complicated by Lonergan’s further distinction that “we are conscious in

two ways: in one way, through our sensibility, we undergo rather passively what we sense

and imagine, our desires and fears, our delights and sorrows, our joys and sadness; in another

way, through our intellectuality,” when we understand, judge, and decide.20 The former,

sensitive-psychic dimension of consciousness receives less attention in Lonergan’s writings

than the intellectual, but Robert Doran’s work thoroughly expands upon and clarifies the

relationship between these two ways of being conscious.21

Developing the sensitive-psychic dimension’s relation to the intellectual-spiritual, Doran

describes how the first “way of being conscious” suffuses the intellectual-spiritual, either

supporting or conflicting with the subject’s orientation toward the real, the true, the good,

and the beautiful.22 This productive tension between the unfolding of unconscious neural

20 Bernard J.F. Lonergan, The Triune God: Systematics, ed. Robert M. Doran and Daniel Monsour,

trans. Michael G. Shields, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 12 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 139. The passivity of our advertence to the sensitive-psyche does not mean that the experiential component of this “way of being conscious” is entirely without direction or agency. The subject does (at least partially) select what she directs her attention toward, but this selection is only partially patterned, ordering itself toward higher intentionality in understanding, judgment, and decision.

21 See for example Robert M. Doran, Subject and Psyche, Second Edition (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994). For a further expansion of these ideas, as well as their expansion into a broader theological context, see also Robert M. Doran, Theology and the Dialectics of History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). Lonergan endorsed Doran’s expansion of his (i.e., Lonergan’s) project, and pointed his own readers to Doran’s work with psyche, symbol, affect, etc., lauding the “distinct advance” offered by Doran’s writings (Lonergan, “Reality, Myth, Symbol,” 389-90). After reading Doran’s suggestions regarding the psyche, conversion, and the symbol, Lonergan’s own work begins to show signs of Doran’s influence in Lonergan’s own work, including Lonergan’s shift to the language of “quasi-operator,” which emphasizes the dynamism with which the entire structure of subjectivity (beginning with the psyche’s integration of neural manifolds) is ordered toward self-transcendence. This development is especially evident in “Mission and the Spirit.” For an excellent analysis of the relation between Lonergan’s work and Doran’s implementation and expansion of it, see Gerard Whelan, Redeeming History: Social Concern in Bernard Lonergan and Robert Doran, Analecta Gregoriana 322 (Rome: Gregorian & Biblical Press, 2013).

22 Robert M. Doran, The Trinity in History: A Theology of the Divine Missions, Volume 1: Missions and Processions, 3rd Revised Edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 199.

17

demands manifested in the psyche and the operations of intentional consciousness is what

Lonergan names the dialectic of the subject.23 Highlighting the integral connection between

these two components of subjectivity, Doran writes:

The movement of life is experienced in the pulsing flow of sensitive psychic experience: the sequence of sensations, memories, images, emotions, conations, associations, bodily movements, and spontaneous intersubjective responses that provides an operational definition of what is meant by the psyche. The search for direction in this movement is engaged in as we raise questions for intelligibility, truth, and the good. These questions provide an operational definition of intentionality. And the good, the telos of the intentional search, is to be understood as a process, at once individual and social, that is engaged in in freedom, and that consists in the making of humanity, in its advance in authenticity, in the fulfillment of its affectivity, and in the direction of human labor toward cultural, social, and vital values that are really worth while.24

In relation to the other levels of intentional consciousness, the sensitive psyche is something

akin to the structure’s foundation, a lower, ‘subterranean’ component, underpinning,

overarching, and accompanying all knowing and doing.25 As underpinning, this dimension of

consciousness functions as the quasi-operator facilitating and governing the transition from

neural processes to psychic occurrences. “As accompanying intentional consciousness it is

the mass and momentum, the color and tone and power of feeling. As reaching beyond or

overarching intentional consciousness it is the [quasi-operator] of community,” establishing

the full range of relationality, whether in terms of intersubjectivity, solidarity, or being-in-

love.26

23 Insight, 242–44. For a thorough overview of this tension, see Doran, Theology and the Dialectics of

History, 177-210. 24 Robert M. Doran, Theology and the Dialectics of History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,

1990), 214. 25 The Trinity in History, 200. 26 Robert M. Doran, What Is Systematic Theology? (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 27.

18

This sensitive-psychic component is partially constitutive of the higher operations it supports,

but it is not synonymous with or reducible to any of these operations (and none of these

operations are reducible to the sensitive psyche):

“We do require images if requisite insights are to occur. And we do feel the process that leads to and culminates in insight: our feeling changes as we move from a disorganized set of experiences to the organization that arises from insight into those experiences; we feel differently when insight emerges. But the insight itself is a function, not of those feelings, but of the intelligent questions on which it depends. The sensitive stream permeates the life of the spirit yet remains distinct, though not separate, from it.”27

Ideally, the sensitive-psychic dimension of consciousness strengthens and supports the

intellectual-spiritual dimension. Unfortunately, this paragon is rarely realized, and disorder

within the sensitive psyche almost inevitably results in a truncated development of the

intellectual-spiritual operations of consciousness.28 In short, the sensitive psyche affects the

entire unfolding of a subject’s vertical finality, the capacity for self-transcendence actualized

in the movement from data to decision.29

27 Theology and the Dialectics of History, 220, emphasis Doran's. 28 These truncations and deviations will be addressed in Chapter 3’s analysis of bias and mimetic

rivalry. The divinely originated solution to deviated self-transcendence will be explored in Chapter 7. For now, it is simply worth noting the integral link between the sensitive-psychic dimension of consciousness and the intellectual-spiritual dimension’s constant quest for meaning. As Doran observes, the key to restoring this psychological integration “lies in grasping the relation between the movement of life experienced by the sensitive psyche and the search for direction in that movement carried on by the inquiring spirit of incarnate human subjects engaged in the dialectical processes that constitute history and its progress or decline” (Theology and the Dialectics of History, 214).

29 This emphasis on the integral impact of the sensitive-psyche on the intellectual-spiritual dimension of consciousness is one of the major differences between Doran and Freud/Jung. As wholly integrated into the structure of subjectivity, the psyche is not unconscious or subconscious. Doran understands those psychologies that present the psyche as wholly or partially inaccessible on the basis of its relegation to an unconscious or subconscious status as indebted to a Kantian counterposition, one that truncates the mysterious and inaccessible “real” to a noumenal realm. For Doran’s own account of these problematics, see Chapters 9 and 10 of Theology and the Dialectics of History.

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3 Intersubjectivity

One facet of the underlying, sensitive-psychic dimension of consciousness is

intersubjectivity. According to Lonergan, human beings are fundamentally, relationally

linked to one another: “Prior to the ‘we’ that results from the mutual love of an ‘I’ and a

‘thou,’ there is the earlier ‘we’ that “precedes the distinction of subjects and survives its

oblivion.”30 This prior ‘we’ is vital and functional.”31 Lonergan addresses this

intersubjectivity “both at the descriptive level, when he gives examples of intersubjective

encounters, and at the theoretical level, when he discusses the role that such encounters,

either genuine or biased, play in the shaping of human life, either in a fully developed or in a

faulty way.”32 While each human being has her or his own personal interests and concerns,

the self “is no Leibnizian monad,” but a communal, social being, joined to others by the

primordial ties “of mother and child, man and wife, father and son.”33 It is within the

intersubjective matrix of these foundational connections that human beings grow and learn,

developing as a part of the family, “clan or tribe or nation.”34 Interestingly, the bonds of

intersubjectivity even extend beyond one’s immediate kin or compatriots, reaching to the

entire human family. As underpinning the intentionally relational, intersubjectivity provides

the sensitive-psychic precondition for the emergence and flourishing of all relationships. As

30 Method in Theology, 56. 31 Ibid., 57. As integrated into the lifeblood of human community, providing the precondition for all

interactions and institutions, intersubjectivity serves as a vital good, one that is necessary for the health, strength, and vigor of human beings. As integrated into the successive development of both particular human relationships and the wider matrix of relationality itself, intersubjectivity functionally links subjects together in the primordial “we” that underpins, overarches, and accompanies the entire unfolding of inherently intersubjective humanity, operatively steering societal and cultural growth.

32 Taddei-Ferretti, “Intersubjectivity in the Thought of Bernard Lonergan,” 191. 33 Insight, 237. 34 Ibid.

20

accompanying the intentionally relational, the intersubjective textures the affective bonds and

pre-reflective fellow-feeling informing our interactions with others.35 As overarching the

intentionally relational, intersubjectivity anticipates its culmination in the community of

being-in-love, ordering the entire structure of intentional relationality toward its interpersonal

telos.

This natural, pre-reflective connection to all one’s fellow human beings is exemplified “in

spontaneous mutual aid,” in situations where one’s “perception, feeling, and bodily

movement are involved, but the help given another is not deliberate but spontaneous.”36

These acts are manifestations of our intersubjectivity; they are moments at which we act in

accordance with an irreducible, relational responsibility, “as if ‘we’ were members of one

another prior to our distinctions of each from the others.”37 This interconnectedness informs

the entire unfolding of the intellectual-spiritual operations and actions it precedes. In such

instances, one’s action is not reflected upon or deliberated in advance. It is only adverted to

during or after its occurrence, and the assistance provided for another occurs as

35 Drawing the term “fellow-feeling” from the writings of Max Scheler, Lonergan states: “Both

community of feeling and fellow-feeling are intentional responses that presuppose the apprehension of objects that arouse feeling. In community of feeling two or more persons respond in parallel fashion to the same object. In fellow-feeling a first person responds to an object, and a second responds to the manifested feeling of the first. So community of feeling would be illustrated by the sorrow felt by both parents for their dead child, but fellow-feeling would be felt by a third party moved by their sorrow. Again, in community worship, there is community of feeling inasmuch as worshippers are similarly concerned with God, but there is fellow-feeling inasmuch as some are moved to devotion by the prayerful attitude of others” (Method in Theology, 58). In Scheler’s writings, fellow-feeling and community of feeling stand as the intentional correlates to emotional identification and psychic contagion, which Lonergan identifies as the “intersubjectivity of feeling” complimentary to his own discussion of spontaneous intersubjective acts and intersubjective meanings (Method in Theology, 58).

36 Method in Theology, 57. 37 Ibid. The shift from this “prior” spontaneity to the deliberative recognition and fostering of this

connection is at least partially constitutive of the shift from the intersubjective to the interpersonal.

21

spontaneously as an arm would be raised to block one’s own head from being hit.38 Lonergan

often cites a particular personal experience as an illustration of such spontaneous,

intersubjective action:

Leading up to the Borghese Gardens in Rome, where I usually go for my favorite walk, there is a ramp. Coming down the ramp was a small child running ahead of its mother. He started to trip and tumbled; I was a good twenty feet away but spontaneously I moved forward before taking any thought at all, as if to pick up the child. There is an intersubjectivity, there is a sense in which we are all members of one another before we think about it. A shriek frightens us; it does not merely startle us but also frightens us.39

This mention of the spontaneous reaction to the shriek provides a transition to the discussion

of the intersubjective carriers of meaning that take place naturally and extemporaneously in

human life.40 The smile is Lonergan’s most frequently cited example of such intersubjective

meaning.41 We do not learn to smile as we learn other skills, which necessitate our acquiring

38 Ibid. 39 Bernard J.F. Lonergan, “Time and Meaning,” in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958-1964,

ed. Robert C. Croken, Frederick E. Crowe, and Robert M. Doran, 2nd Revised Edition, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 6 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 96. This episode is alluded to in many of Lonergan’s works, and it is often mentioned as a correlate to Scheler’s The Nature of Sympathy, which Lonergan references as a foundational text on intersubjectivity. See Method in Theology, 57; “Analogy of Meaning,” in Philosophical Papers 1958-1964, ed. Robert C. Croken, Frederick E. Crowe, and Robert M. Doran. 2nd Revised Edition, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 6 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 187; “Philosophical Positions with Regard to Knowing,” in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958-1964, ed. Robert C. Croken, Frederick E. Crowe, and Robert M. Doran, 2nd Revised Edition, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 6 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 241-42; “The World Mediated by Meaning,” in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965-1980, ed. Robert C. Croken and Robert M. Doran, 2nd Revised Edition, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 17 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 110-11.

40 Lonergan’s articulation of meaning and its carriers will be more fully addressed in Chapter 4. For now, I am briefly treating intersubjective carriers of meaning in order to establish how profoundly intersubjectivity impacts and shapes the unfolding of all relationality.

41 Method in Theology, 60. See also “Method in Catholic Theology,” in Philosophical Papers 1958-1964, ed. Robert C. Croken, Frederick E. Crowe, and Robert M. Doran. 2nd Revised Edition, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 6 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 37; “Time and Meaning,” 97; “Analogy of Meaning,” in Philosophical Papers 1958-1964, ed. Robert C. Croken, Frederick E. Crowe, and Robert M. Doran. 2nd Revised Edition, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 6 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 210-11; Topics in Education: The Cincinnati Lectures of 1959 on the Philosophy of Education, ed. Robert M. Doran and H. Daniel Monsour, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 10

22

habits and developing ordered patterns of actions.42 The smile happens spontaneously. At the

same time, we do not learn the meaning of the smile in the same way we learn the meanings

of words, sentences, or phrases. “There is something irreducible to the smile. It cannot be

explained by causes outside meaning.”43 Where the meanings of words can be objectively

communicated and expressed in a relatively standardized fashioned, the intersubjective

meaning of the smile “supposes the interpersonal situation with its antecedents in previous

encounters. […] Moreover, that meaning is not about some object. Rather it reveals or even

betrays the subject, and the revelation is immediate.”44

4 Intentional Relationality and Community

Intersubjective meanings are manifested and experienced on a pre-reflective level, engaging

and arising from the sensitive-psychic dimension of consciousness. But beyond these

common intersubjective meanings, there are also common meanings which exist and operate

exclusively within the intellectual-spiritual dimension of consciousness, insofar as a

particular community is shaped by a common field of experience, shares a common

understanding and cooperatively avoids misinterpretation, makes common and/or agreed

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 166-67, 210; “Analysis of Meaning and Introduction to Religion,” in Early Works on Theological Method 1, ed. Robert M. Doran and Robert C. Croken, 1st edition, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 22 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 535; Bernard J.F. Lonergan, “The Absence of God in Modern Culture,” in A Second Collection, ed. Robert Doran S.J and John Dadosky, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 13 (University of Toronto Press, 2016), 87; “Belief: Today’s Issue,” in A Second Collection, ed. Robert Doran S.J and John Dadosky, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 13 (University of Toronto Press, 2016), 78; “The World Mediated by Meaning,” in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965-1980, ed. Robert C. Croken and Robert M. Doran, 2nd Revised Edition, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 17 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 111.

42 Ibid., 28–30. 43 Ibid., 60. 44 Ibid.

23

upon judgments regarding what is true, and collectively constitutes itself by way of a

common will.45

This communal self-constitution is particularly important, as “Human living is strictly human

when you move to that fourth level [of decision] where people are acting, relating with one

another.”46 It is within this intentionally communal component of human living that we are

called to fuller existential flourishing. In communities, our interpersonal relationality allows

us to “emerge as persons, meet one another in a common concern for values, seek to abolish

the organization of human living on the basis of competing egoisms and to replace it by an

organization on the basis of [human beings’] perceptiveness and intelligence, [their]

reasonableness, and [their] responsible exercise of freedom.”47 Such freedom ought to be

understood, not primarily in terms of the removal of negative constraints upon the individual,

but as the capacity to grow into the most attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible, and

loving subject one can be. This exercise of freedom is inextricably linked to all other

members of the community, as no element of human life ever occurs in a vacuum.48

Attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible human living is, therefore, “at once

individual and social. Individuals do not just operate to meet their needs but cooperate to

45 Bernard J.F. Lonergan, “Philosophical Positions with Regard to Knowing,” in Philosophical and

Theological Papers 1958-1964, ed. Robert C. Croken, Frederick E. Crowe, and Robert M. Doran, 2nd Revised Edition, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 6 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 234–35.

46 Ibid., 235. 47 Method in Theology, 10. 48 For a detailed discussion of human liberty, particularly as it relates to value, development, and

relationality, see Method in Theology, 50-2).

24

meet one another’s needs.”49 This natural tendency toward cooperation results from the

bonds of intersubjectivity, and the sublative succession of intellectual-spiritual operations

practically and creatively orders collaboration. “As the community develops its institutions to

facilitate cooperation, so individuals develop skills to fulfill the roles and perform the tasks

set by the institutional framework. Though the roles are fulfilled and the tasks are performed

that the needs be met, still all is done not blindly but knowingly, not necessarily but freely.”50

This is because the development of shared meanings, values, institutions, and

accomplishments is not ordered simply toward an unlimited exaltation of human ingenuity.

Instead, this movement is meant to foster reflection upon the higher goals of human

flourishing in self-transcendence. “The process is not merely the service of [humanity]; it is

above all the making of [humanity], [humanity’s] advance in authenticity, the fulfillment of

[humanity’s] affectivity, and the direction of [humanity’s] work to the particular goods and a

good of order that are worth while.”51

This advancement of human accomplishments into the higher horizons of truth, goodness,

and beauty is a natural consequence of the shared source of our intersubjective and

interpersonal attributes, interactions, spontaneities, etc.: “[Our] separate, unrevealed, hidden

cores have a common circle of reference, the human community, and for believers an

ultimate point of reference, which is God who is all in all.”52 Our personal projects of self-

transcendence and authenticity are ordered toward ends extending beyond our own interests.

49 Method in Theology, 52. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Bernard J.F. Lonergan, “Self-Transcendence: Intellectual, Moral, Religious,” in Philosophical and

Theological Papers 1965-1980, ed. Robert C. Croken and Robert M. Doran, 2nd Revised Edition, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 17 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 314.

25

Similarly, although the self-transcendence described by Lonergan usually refers to the

subject transcending her finitude by raising questions, attending to data, understanding,

judging, deciding, then objectifying and reflecting upon these operations, the fullness of self-

transcendence results from the subject wholly giving herself over to another in the apex of

relationality: love.

5 The Dynamic State of Being-in-Love

Lonergan describes the dynamic state of being-in-love as the telos of the subject’s movement

toward self-transcendence. This state reorders and reorients all other conscious operations:

[Our] questions for intelligence, for reflection, and for deliberation constitute our capacity for self-transcendence. That capacity becomes an actuality when one falls in love. Then one’s being becomes being-in-love. Such being-in-love has its antecedents, its causes, its conditions, its occasions. But once it has blossomed forth and as long as it lasts, it takes over. It is the first principle. From it flow one’s desires and fears, one’s joys and sorrows, one’s discernment of values, one’s decisions and deeds.53

There are different kinds of being-in-love, and Lonergan identifies romantic, parental,

communal, regional, and sororal or fraternal loves as common examples.54 In the most

profound instances of such existentially constitutive relationality,

The intersubjective situation, the vital interchange of mutual presence—all the aspects of intersubjectivity studied by psychologists—and the importance of decision in leading a human life are given full emphasis. … [You] have two subjects, and the two subjects are not totally separate. Besides ‘I’ and ‘thou,’ there is ‘we,’ ‘us,’ ‘ourselves,’ ‘ours’—a viewpoint for living.55

53 Method in Theology, 105. In Lonergan’s writings, being-in-love is often hyphenated to signify that

the very core of a person’s being is transformed by subsisting in a state of love. 54 Ibid. 55 Bernard J.F. Lonergan, “Philosophical Positions with Regard to Knowing,” in Philosophical and

Theological Papers 1958-1964, ed. Robert C. Croken, Frederick E. Crowe, and Robert M. Doran, 2nd Revised Edition, Collected Works Of Bernard Lonergan, Vol. 6 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 235.

26

Here, the intersubjective situation manifests itself in an existential sense on the part of both

subjects. To invert Lonergan’s initial description of intersubjectivity in Method in Theology,

the primordial, pre-intentional ‘we’ of intersubjectivity is followed through to its fullest

conclusion and given a particular, intentional manifestation when the ‘we’ that results from

the mutual love of an ‘I’ and a ‘thou’ becomes somehow constitutive of both parties

involved. The self-presence of both parties is now disproportionate to that of each individual

party, as each of the two lovers is “bonded into a ‘we’ [by] participating in the self-presence

of the community [of two] that that love is.”56

This particular type of ‘we’ is brought about by a relationship of mutual self-mediation, an

existential positing of self —of making oneself who one wants to be—by which and in which

each party wholly gives herself or himself over to the beloved, entering a state transcending

the limits of giving and receiving.57 In such a state, two people open themselves up to each

other in the most profound way possible, with each person loving and acting for and with the

beloved.58 In such situations, the parties involved are drawn into the dynamic state of being-

in-love.

56 Jeremy W. Blackwood, And Hope Does Not Disappoint: Love, Grace, and Subjectivity in the Work

of Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J. (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2017), 169. 57 For Lonergan’s overview of the various types of mediation, including mutual self-mediation, see

Bernard J.F. Lonergan, “The Mediation of Christ in Prayer,” in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958-1964, ed. Robert C. Croken, Frederick E. Crowe, and Robert M. Doran, 2nd Revised Edition, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 6 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 160–82. This account of mutual self-mediation presumes the genuineness and authenticity of the connection. Unfortunately, codependents are also technically mutually self-mediating, as the inherent value of human connection, spontaneity, and communion can be distorted by trauma, bias, etc. I will address inauthenticity and decline in relationality in Chapter 3.

58 Robert M. Doran, What Is Systematic Theology? (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 56.

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While human loves have a profound, transformative impact on a person’s life, it is in the

dynamic state of being-in-love with God that we find our intentionality and capacity for self-

transcendence fulfilled.59 In the paramount instance of being-in-love, the object of one’s love

is God, and such a love results in a complete reorientation of one’s whole way of life.60

Although the exact relationship of the dynamic state of being-in-love to the four-level

structure of conscious operations has been disputed, it is difficult to deny that Lonergan’s

later writings highlight the way this state elevates, heals, and provides the culmination of

consciousness’ entire structure.61 In one particularly interesting passage, Lonergan describes

how the four levels of experience, understanding, judgment, and decision “may prove open at

both ends.”62 Lonergan writes:

Beyond the moral operator that promotes us from judgments of fact to judgments of value with their retinue of decisions and actions, there is a further realm of interpersonal relations and total commitment in which human beings tend to find the immanent goal of their being and, with it, their fullest joy and deepest peace. […] From a specifically Christian viewpoint, I have characterized the total commitment of religious living as “being in love in an unrestricted manner”; I have associated it with St. Paul’s statement that “God’s love has flooded our inmost heart through the Holy Spirit he has given us” (Romans 5:5); and I have noted that the Christian case of the

59 That is, the dynamic state of being-in-love with God is the closest we come to a pre-beatific-vision

fulfillment of our sensitive-psyche’s desire for the divine. 60 Method in Theology, 105. 61 For a thorough overview of the debates surrounding whether this dynamic state constitutes a distinct

fifth level of intentional consciousness, see Blackwood, And Hope Does Not Disappoint, 179-234. Blackwood argues that being-in-love does constitute a fifth level, and I find his arguments compelling. He also argues that proportionate being-in-love (i.e., love among human beings) also elevates and heals self-presence, operating in and through experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding in a manner of sublation meriting the term “fifth level.” I also agree with Blackwood on this point. For the purposes of my present thesis, however, I will limit my discussion of being-in-love to being-in-love with God. This is both because the unrestrictedness of being-in-love with God makes it the paramount instance of human loving, and because its complete elevation and reorientation of subjectivity is necessary for reversing large-scale relational decline. Human participation in such reversal will be discussed in this thesis’ final chapter.

62 Bernard J.F. Lonergan, “Philosophy and the Religious Phenomenon,” in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965-1980, ed. Robert C. Croken and Robert M. Doran, 2nd Revised Edition, Collected Works Of Bernard Lonergan, Vol. 17 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 400.

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subject being in love with God is complemented by God’s manifestation of his love for us in the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus.63

This expanded horizon is the culmination of the sensitive-psychic and intellectual-spiritual

dimensions of consciousness, sublating all that precedes it in a far more profound sense than

understanding sublates experiencing, judging sublates understanding, or deciding sublates

judging. Within the dynamic state of being-in-love with God, the subject deliberates, makes

judgments of value, and acts responsibly, but these operations are brought to fulfillment,

converted, “broadened and deepened and heightened and enriched but not superseded, as

ready to deliberate and judge and decide and act with the easy freedom of those that do all

good because they are in love.”64

Having brought intentional consciousness to its zenith, the dynamic state of being-in-love

then works ‘downward’ from the ‘highest level,’ reordering our daily lives as we cooperate

with God’s grace, acting in interpersonally cooperative conformity to the true, the good, and

the beautiful.65 In this way, the dynamic state of being-in-love has a special relationship to

our relationally responsible decisions, as one’s self-transcendence is posited in an existential

sense, manifesting itself in graced, loving acts. These acts pertain to the subject as both

individual and social, “[bearing] fruit in a love of one’s neighbor that strives mightily to

63 Ibid., 400–01. The gift of God’s love that constitutes this state is synonymous with sanctifying grace,

with the notional distinction that within the stage of meaning “when the world of interiority has been made the explicit ground of the worlds of theory and of common sense […], the gift of God’s love first is described as an experience and only consequently is objectified in theoretical categories” (Method in Theology, 107). This understanding of transposition will be addressed in later chapters on the stages of meaning, the Four-Point Hypothesis, and cooperation with the divinely-originated solution to decline.

64 Method in Theology, 107. 65 Ibid., 102-03.

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bring about the kingdom of God on this earth.”66 Because God loves all human beings, this

overflowing of grace flooding our hearts transforms our horizons, compelling us to spread

God’s love to the entire human family. In the sense that the dynamic state, “as principle of

acts of love, hope, faith, repentance, and so on, is grace as cooperative,” we are called to

responsibly respond to it of our own will and volition, outwardly manifesting our reply to

God’s love by loving our fellow human beings.67

In the dynamic state of being-in-love, therefore, grace transforms the subject’s entire

understanding of self, especially in her relation to God, to other subjects, to the pursuit of

cultural development, and to the creation of just social structures. Lonergan’s articulation of

the scale of values provides an explanatory heuristic by which these relationships can be

integrally articulated. This scale will serve as one of the primary tools for my own

explorations of intersubjectivity’s role in progress, decline, and redemption.

6 The Scale of Values

Doran identifies the scale of values as one of Lonergan’s most important contributions to a

philosophy and theology of history, as it offers a dynamic, non-reductive account of the

relation between subject and community, grounding both these terms in their orientation

toward—and influence from—God’s love:

The scale of values enables us to place the issue of personal development, of growth toward the integrity of the dialectic of the subject, in a context that is at once

66 Ibid., 105. 67 Ibid., 107. For a detailed treatment of the relationship between operative and cooperative grace, see

Bernard Lonergan, Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).

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religious, cultural, and social. Then integrity can be understood as identical with the authenticity that makes one a principle of benevolence and beneficence, an agent of genuine collaboration and true love in the world mediated by meaning and motivated by values.68

This scale is presented in Method in Theology’s exploration of feelings, which Lonergan

divides into two types: the non-intentional responses to states and trends (e.g., fatigue,

hunger, irritability), and intentional responses to value or disvalue.69 Authentic intentional

feelings respond to values ordered according to a “preferential scale, where the respective

positions in the scale are based in the self-transcendence to which we are carried by different

types of value.”70 These types of value are—in order of sublation—vital, social, cultural,

personal, and religious.

Vital values consist of those goods necessary for the fostering and preservation of health and

strength. Examples of such vital goods include food, water, and shelter. Social values are

those goods of order whereby schemes for the equitable distribution of vital goods are

fostered and preserved in recurrence.71 Examples of social goods include economies,

political orders, law enforcement, and basic infrastructure such as roads, railroads, sewers,

etc. Cultural values are those meanings, values, and orientations informing a community’s

68 Theology and the Dialectics of History, 93. Doran’s prioritization of the scale of values and its

multiple implementations is echoed in the works of several other Lonergan scholars. For examples of the scale’s applications, see Kenneth R. Melchin, ‘Democracy, Sublation, and the Scale of Values,’ in The Importance of Insight: Essays in Honour of Michael Vertin, ed. John J. Liptay and David Liptay (Toronto: University of Toronto Press: 2007), 183-96; Joseph Ogbonnaya, Lonergan, Social Transformation and Sustainable Human Development (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013); Neil Ormerod, “The Grace-Nature Distinction and the Construction of