Braman, Brian J. "Bernard Lonergan On Being Yourself" in Meaning and Authenticity: Bernard Lonergan and Charles Taylor on the Drama of Human Existence. University of Toronto Press, 2008.
Lonergan states that authenticity and self-transcendence are connected, and "authentic self-transcendence" is through conversion. Lonergan sees conversion as three-fold: intellectual, moral, and religious. Lonergan sees this as one movement to achieve self-transcendence even though they are "distinct." To better understand we will look at them separately. The first one we will discuss is intellectual conversion. One could see conversion as similar to Plato's tale of turning towards the light.
Lonergan thinks of intellectual conversion as "affirming one's self as a knower" (60). Braman states: "In this moment of what Lonergan calls self-affirmation, what is grasped is the dynamic finality of the conscious subject. This dynamic finality is revealed through a primordial eros that Lonergan calls the pure unrestricted desire to know" (60). Lonergan thinks of this desire as different from other kinds of desires. "The desire to know differs from other desires not just because it has a different object but because it is a radically different kind of desire: under the sway of it reason does not seek to possess, master, or control its object" (60). Lonergan does not think of knowing as looking. Knowing includes experience, understanding, and judging. We experience to understand, we attempt to understand to judge, we judge in order to know "particular beings," we want to know particular beings to know "being in general." Braman asserts, "Intellectual conversion is the discovery of the erotic and transcendent nature of human knowing" (60). Lonergan believes our questions lead to the transcendentals, the intelligible, the true, and the good.
Braman states that in Insight (a major work by Lonergan), Lonergan presents a "phenomenological and hermeneutical account of human intentionality, such that 'consciousness itself is not a perception, but an experience, a usually tacit presence to ourselves that is concomitant to our intentional and imaginally and linguistically mediated presence to the world'." Human knowing is not just experience, or understanding, or judgement, but all three together. Human knowing is a "dynamic structure" that is "self-assembling, self-constituting. It puts itself together, one part summoning forth the next, till the whole is reached" (61). What Lonergan means is that you have experience or data and you seek to understand this data by asking questions until you get a insight or insights; once you understand what it is it leads to asking questions of is it true which leads to judging the accuracy of it; then more questions leads to evaluating is it worthwhile to know or value. Is this knowledge valuable. It is a dynamic structure that through questions is moved from stage to stage. Braman states, "To have experienced, understood, and affirmed this dynamic unity is to be self-affirmed as a knower; self-affirmation posits the fact that the 'self as affirmed is characterized by such occurrences as sensing, perceiving, imagining, inquiring, understanding, formulating, reflecting, grasping, the unconditioned and affirming' (61)." The unconditioned is when all the requirements for knowing are fulfilled. Intellectual conversion is a result of accepting the results of our self-affirmation as a knower.
The essential part of intellectual conversion is that it [pulls] "one out of the attitude that the world of sense is the criterion of reality" (61). It also goes against the idea that knowing is looking. This false view of human knowing "overlooks the important distinction between a world mediated by meaning and the world of immediacy" (61). To Charles Taylor, a world mediated by meaning means that "we are in a sense surrounded by meaning; in the words we exchange, in all the signs we deploy, in the art, music, literature we create and enjoy, in the very shape of the man-made environment most of us live in" (61). Lonergan defines the world as mediated by meaning: "Again words express not merely what we have found out for ourselves but also all we care to learn from the memories of other men, from the common sense of the community, from the pages of literature, from the labors of scholars, from the investigations of scientists, from the experience of saints, from the meditations of philosophers and the theologians" (61). In contrast, the world of immediacy is "the sum of what is heard, touched, tasted, smelt, and felt" (61). It is the world of the five senses. It sees knowing as looking. It is the world of children before they acquire language. It is the type of knowing we share with the animal kingdom. It is this "ocular vision" that creates the dualism of the "subject": "it is the subject in here trying to get out to the subjects out there" (61).
Intellectual conversion is the affirmation of the knower. We understand that the dynamic structure is to a "universe of being manifested in the unfolding of a single thrust, the eros of the human spirit" (62). Be experience in order to understand, we understand in order to judge, we judge in order to know particular beings in order to understand being in general. Being is not known through looking. "Being is known through the discursive raising and answering rational questions, and intellectual conversion is the explicit account of intentional self-transcendence" (62). The intellectually converted understands that knowing is oriented to knowing being, "to get beyond the subject, to reach what would be even if this subject happened not to exist" (62). We want to know the "whole of being."
We have seen that the object of our questioning is to know the whole of being. We want to know what is true and real. Though, the "intention of being is unrestricted, the realization of this intention is incremental" (63). We can only ask questions only "one at a time." We come to know things only gradually. Intellectual conversion comes with humility. We must face the fact of our "contingency as knowers" and to be honest with our limitations and allow the the pure unrestricted desire to know "unfold through the dynamic of the question in order to allow being to manifest itself, that is, to respond to something not in us" (63).
In regards to living the authentic life, it is not enough to know the real and the true. Authentic living is more than just knowing. "To be truly reasonable demands consistency between what we know and what we do; not only must there be a willingness to accept the truth of our intellectual conversion, we must also be willing to live up to that truth" (63). We must look at the relationship "between our knowing and doing." It calls for an integration of doing with our knowing. Be doers of the word and not hearers only. (James 1: 22 I think) Braman asserts, "This higher integration demands that what we know to be true, real, good, and valuable be translated into the choices we make and the actions we perform": 'knowing a world mediated by meaning is only a prelude to man's dealing with nature, to his interpersonal living and working with others, to his existential becoming what he is to make of himself by his own choices and deeds' (63-64). We will discuss moral conversion in part 3.
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