Perspectives on the Unity of the Human Person in B. Lonergan

Milltown Institute

Nelson Medina2009

Perspectives on the Unity of the Human Person in B. Lonergan

Texts Considered :

Chapter Text

1Adnotationes de Verbo Incarnato (1935-1936)

2 Finality, Love, Marriage (1943)

3 Insight, Chapter 8 (1957)

4 Insight, Chapter 15 (1957)

5 Method in Theology (1972)

… as knowable / known

Perspectives

Human Being...

… as knower modes of presence of

the self to itself the subject as subject self-appropriation

Perspectives :

Evolutionary (Ch. 2) Hierarchical (Ch. 3) Developmental (Ch. 4) Dialectical (Ch. 5)

ChapterChapter 11

Chapter One :

Classical background Vocabulary Original problem: kinds of substance, kinds of

souls

Explanatory Knowledge Epistême as opposed to dôxa The what turned into the why (Meta., Book Z)

On Lonergan's Intellectual Conversion

On Lonergan's Intellectual Conversion - I

Where does the human mind grasp the why?

Every explanation entails a connection between terms.

What is that connection, that nexus? Is it seen, deduced, created...?

On Lonergan's Intellectual Conversion - II

Thomists' Dominant Position: Cajetan, John of St. Thomas, Suárez, et al:

Knowledge as a comparison of impressed species within the intellect → Kant's analytic and synthetic propositions.

Understanding occurs in the 'faculty' of judgement.

No connection between the category of substance and the existing substances.

On Lonergan's Intellectual Conversion - III

Aquinas' Position: The ratio, the nexus itself, is grasped: 'You

understand something...' (Lonergan) The existence of that which exists is crucial to

the act of understanding.

From Nominalism to Critical Realism

'My nominalism had been in opposition, not to intelligence or understanding, but to the central role ascribed to universal concepts'

On Lonergan's Intellectual Conversion - IV

Christ: A Human Being who is not a Human Person (Leeming's Course)

The question is unavoidable, on the basis of the datum revelatum.

There is no way of 'looking at' Christ and coming to know what and who he is, in metaphysical terms. [Distinction between essence and existence]

'It was through Stephanou... that I learnt to speak of human knowledge as not intuitive but discursive with the decisive component in judgement.'

A Vision of Science, anda Response to Kant

The what turned into why (Aristotle)

Why → Nexus → Grasping of Existence

Knowledge is knowledge of the real. It is explanatory knowledge.

Science is understanding (not merely organised data or method)

A species is the answer to the problem of living in an environment.

The 'Half-Way' House:Intuitionist version

Knowledge = Mental abstraction of universal concepts from things.

Materialism Idealism

Real = Observable

Lonergan's version:

Knowledge = (Discursive) process from experience to understanding to judging.

'The norms of objectivity reside not in some antiseptic distance from objects but in fidelity to the project of questioning. Therefore to speak of the object correlative to the unrestrictive nature of questioning as real is not to indulge in wishful thinking. Indeed, the intention of being is the core of meaning...' (T. J. McPartland)

Real = Verified

ChapterChapter 22

Finality, Love, Marriage (FLM, 1943)

Searching for an all‑embracing perspective in which love and the human could be properly situated

'The most essential end of marriage is the procreation... but its most excellent end lies on the supernatural level of personalist development.'

From the aims of marriage to the 'cosmic breadth of a simultaneous context of nature, history and grace.'

Finality, threefold:

Absolute 'It is to God in his intrinsic goodness: it is

universal: it is unique; it is hypothetically necessary...'

Horizontal 'It results from abstract essence; it holds even

when the object is in isolation; it is to a motive or term that is proportionate to essence.'

Vertical...

Vertical Finality

Concrete 'Not from the isolated instance but from the

conjoined plurality.'

Statistical 'In the field not of natural (classic) but of

statistical law.'

Universal 'Though accidental to the isolated object or the

abstract essence, it is of the very idea of our hierarchic universe, of the ordination of things devised and exploited by the divine Artisan.'

Situating FLM in its Context:Science, Sex and Fecundity

Development in Biological Science

Sex(Personalist

end)

Fecundity(Procreative

end)

How concurring but different ends relate to each other?

Science and Vertical Finality

Science is about LAWS

Systematic(Classical)

Non-Systematic(Statistical)

The statistical, probabilistic side of modern science connects with the 'per accidens'

component of Vertical Finality.

The Ascent of Love

Where does Vertical Finality's upthrust come from?

If (statistical) science is taken seriously: from Emergent Probability.

If Absolute Finality is taken seriously: from God; from God's grace.

If human essence and operation is taken seriously: from the many goods of friendship.

Nature

History

Grace

An Evolutionary Perspective

Love and the human, situated Sex is not just a biological fact on top of which

a varied array of behaviours can then occur but the whole reality that, starting at the organic level reaches the finer details of labour division at home.

'What is new in emergences? [...] Shull's response was: new relations. His series of emergences are instances of vertical finality..' (W. Mathews)

ChapterChapter 33

Levels of Human Activity

Insight's Chapter 8, devoted to Things:

Bringing to light how the results of different sciences add up to an understanding of the complexity and unity of the human being...

Lonergan's extensive analysis helps to tackle the threats of mechanicism and reductionism, which are often mistakenly regarded as unassailable scientific thought.

Itinerary of Chapter 8 of Insight

Aristotle's substance

Kant's noumenon

Darwin's species

Lonergan's complex account of the unity and concreteness of things

A 'Thing' can be regarded...

… as a 'body' An 'already out there

now real' To whom we relate

to as animals do Example: Water

quenching my thirst.

… as intelligible A 'thing' To whom we relate

to at a proper human level

Example: Water that has to reach every household in the city.

Fully Human Knowing

Experiencing – Understanding – Judging :

Experience supplies materials for questions; Through questions for intelligence it moves to

accumulations of related insights which are expressed or formulated in concepts, suppositions, definitions, postulates, hypotheses, theories;

Through questions for reflection it attains a further component which hitherto has been referred to as verification.

Grasping Things' Unity

'Body' : A.O.T.N.R.

Unity grasped in experiential

conjugates

Unity grasped in explanatory

conjugates

Instictive,Animal

Aristotle'sCategories

Fully Human Knowledge

Beyond the Seduction of Reductionism

Reductionism... … pledges to explain everything using the set of

laws that already explain the simplest and most basic phenomena in the universe.

… intends to embrace all phenomena as subsections of a huge text of physics.

Presupposed question: Are new concepts strictly required when moving

from physics to chemistry, from chemistry to biology, from biology to sensitive psychology, or from sensitive to rational psychology?

Charles Darwin, the Reductionist

Complexity in terms of the basic rules of evolution and sex

Every aspect of human life can and must be explained in terms of the same basic principles leading the evolutionary process from species to species.

Species are not fixed in time but are subject to the triplet: variation, inheritance and natural selection.

Lonergan's Response to Reductionism - I

Higher and lower levels 'The successive departments of science are

related, for the laws of the lower order yield images in which insight grasps clues to laws of the higher order.' (Lonergan)

'In Lonergan's upward view of the scientific disciplines... the key notion is that every higher level and its higher conjugates forms or relations establishes a completely new dimension of freedom from the constraints of the lower levels.' (W. Mathews)

Lonergan's Response to Reductionism - II One Human Being,

Several Sets of Laws Understanding is irreducible to its materials! The unity of the human being cannot be

correctly expressed by the accumulation or successful accomplishment of the same basic routines that can be satisfactorily explained by the laws of physics, chemistry or biology.

The human being derives its unity from the successful integration of the operations of each level into higher and more complex algorithms whose intelligibility neither contradicts nor can be deduced from any lower level.

Lonergan's Response to Reductionism - III A Notion of Species

'A species is not conceived as an accumulated aggregate of theoretically observable variations...'

It is 'an intelligible solution to a problem of living in a given environment.'

The facets and dimensions of the "problem" will correspond to the facets and dimensions of the "solution."

The inteligibility of the problem and the laws involved correspond to the complexity of the form of life responding to that complexity.

The Theorem of Isomorphism

Imagination is to Understanding as any Lower Level of Being is to the Next Level Up

'The relation between our understanding and our imagination reflects a fundamental ontological structure in the universe as a whole. [...] If we understand the structure of the relation between the understanding and the senses and imagination, we will understand something about the universe as a whole.' (W. Mathews)

"Intelligibility that is Intelligent"

Intelligibility is Intrinsic to Being Potential intelligibility makes experience

irreplaceable for knowing, formal intelligibility makes understanding its central component, and actual intelligibility makes judgement necessary in order to acquire true knowledge.

A Notion of the Spiritual 'Let us say that intelligibility that is not

intelligent is material and that intelligibility that is intelligent is spiritual.'

The Central Form as constituting the Unity of the Human Being Starting from the Adjective...

The spiritual is not first a noun to be scrutinised in the laboratory. 'Spiritual' is the ever-present adjective that silently accompanies intelligent acts of the 'intelligibility' that we are. It is not beyond but within the human.

The Spiritual:Centre and Ground of Unity

'The spiritual is comprehensive; what can embrace the whole universe through knowledge, can provide the centre and ground of unity... of a single man.' (Lonergan)

ChapterChapter 44

A Developmental Perspective

How does human development: organic, psychic and intellectual, relates over time to the self?

Development is not another name for change. It is not a further element in explaining how

members of the same genus, or even across genera, are different. (Is a poet 'more developed' than a mathematician?)

Development entails the idea of some direction, or more precisely, some finality.

Introducing Genetic Method

Beyond Classical and Statistical Methods...

In Ch. 15 of Insight Lonergan introduces Genetic Method.

The problem is not simply that things change but the fact that new skills can be acquired by the same subjects.

And new sets of conjugates rule successive and connected stages of the same being.

What Remains Constant When Development Happens?

'There is to be affirmed an individual, existing unity'

'By central potency it is individual; by central form it is a unity, identity, whole; by central act it is existent.'

Central potency, central form and central act remain constant throughout development.

Development has to be understood in terms of conjugate potencies, conjugate forms and conjugate acts, and not their "central" counterparts.

Organic Development

Genes Act On Organisms, Or Is It the Other Way Around?

Organic development is not the execution of a computer programme.

The unintelligible unpredictability of the encounter of two binding protein sequences clearly corresponds to what Lonergan affirms of lower manifolds of events as akin to potency and coincidental events in that manifold yielding higher conjugate forms that, once established as regular, can become potency for an even higher level of integration.

Integrators and Operators

Two Aspects of Higher Systems Complementary ways of approaching the set of

conjugate forms that constitute the unity of a proportionate being.

An integrator is not superimposed on a particular thing; it is a term for conjugate forms that systematise the otherwise coincidental manifolds of a developing organism.

The same conjugates both integrate the present stage and pull up to a higher and more complex stage. This aspect is captured by the notion of an "operator."

Psychic Development: A Parallel with E. Erikson' Eight Stages

1. Trust as opposed to Mistrust.

2. Autonomy as opposed to Shame

and Doubt.

3. Initiative as opposed to Guilt.

5. Identity as opposed to Role Confusion.

6. Intimacy and Solidarity as opposed to

Isolation.

7. Generativity as opposed to Stagnation.

4. Industry as opposed to Inferiority.

8. Integrity as opposed to Despair.

Intellectual Development - I

A Case in Point: Becoming an 'Expert Reader'

It is not learning to read but becoming able to read in order to learn.

'Intellectual development rests upon the dominance of a detached and disinterested desire to know. It reveals to a man a universe of being, in which he is but an item, and a universal order, in which his desires and fears, his delight and anguish, are but infinitesimal components in the history of mankind.' (Lonergan)

Intellectual Development - II

The Aims of Intellectual Development:

'Intellectual development invites man to become intelligent and reasonable not only in his knowing but also in his living, to guide his actions by referring them, not as an animal to a habitat, but as an intelligent being to the intelligible context of some universal order that is or is to be.' (Lonergan)

'Reading changes our lives, and our lives change our reading.' (Maryanne Wolff)

ChapterChapter 55

A Dialectical Perspective

Dialectics

Religion

Authenticity

Love

Intersubjectivity

Common Sense

History

If along with Lonergan one admits that there is an utterly transcendental yearning that always dwells in the human heart, one may also share his opinion that the most intriguing features of our dialectical nature lead to enquiries about religion.

In making sense of religion the importance of the quest for authenticity, as a prominent light in such a complex and long-life process, is promptly apparent.

The unity of the human being, at the level of responsible decision and truly human love, is not simply a given but a long and often tortuous interpersonal striving.

One of the central ideas is that the course of history can be analysed as the resultant of an ideal line of progress from acts according to nature, of decline from acts contrary to nature, and of renaissance from the exercise of the supernatural virtues.

Common sense development is inherently dialectical through the tension between intellectual development as such and the inertia of spontaneous sensitivity of individuals, groups and humankind at large.

Be it in religious life, under a vow of obedience, or in married life, under the promise of fidelity, even a well worked-out concept of love cannot take the place of love itself.

Religion Development Dialectical

Religion beyond Experience The reality—the quality of being "real"—

involved in the realm of religion must not be confined to the initial levels of experiencing, those dealing with particular lands or entertaining an initial understanding.

Religion is real not in the sense of the "outside now" that can be checked out and fully known by looking at, but real in the fuller sense of the transcendental method that experiences, inquires, weighs the evidence and then passes judgement solely on the basis of the virtually unconditioned.

Common Sense: Beyond theSubject – Object Dichotomy

More than 'Imperfect' Knowledge The dialectical unfolding of communities can

mirror intellectual processes but has a root that is not only intellectual. We humans are greatly complex objects of knowledge, because we are greatly complex subjects of knowing.

Intersubjectivity becomes unavoidable when it comes to the realm of common sense.

Furthermore, 'the social world of practical common sense pulses in accordance with the rhythms of emergent probability.'

FurtherFurtherDevelopmentDevelopment

PossibilitiesPossibilities

Theological Themes - I

The unity of Christ as a study case of explanatory knowledge.

The grounding of 'vertical' finality in 'absolute' finality.

The notion of the spiritual as "intelligibility that is intelligent."

Love as a unifier of the subject, unifier between subjects and cause of dialectical ascent according to God's manner of loving.

Integrators and Operators.

Theological Themes - II

The concepts of solidarity in sin and solidarity in grace.

Religion as "falling in love" with God and as a response and development of his magnificent gift of love for us.

The proposal of graced forms of knowing. Common sense, beyond the Subject – Object

Dichotomy.

Thank You!Thank You!