Bernard Lonergan's Lecture on Self-Transcendence Part 1

Lonergan, Bernard J. F. Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965-1980.

In this lecture Bernard Lonergan discusses five topics: the self, self-transcendence, intellectual self-transcendence, moral self-transcendence, and religious self-transcendence.

1 The Self
To speak of the self is to speak about what is private and intimate. It is also personal. It is not personal in the "individual sense" (314). It is "a becoming aware, a growth in self-consciousness, a heightening of one's self-appropriation" because others also experience the self in its unfolding.

Lonergan distinguishes between substance and subject. when one is asleep one is a substance and "only potentially a subject." One must dream to be a subject. The one who dreams is only a subject minimally. "One is more a subject when one is awake, still more when one is actively intelligent, still more when one is actively reasonable, still more in one's deliberations and decisions when one is actively responsible and free" (314).

The human substance is always the same whether sleeping or awake, a child or adult, normal or insane, "sober or drunk," intelligent or dumb, a good person or an evil person. Concerning substance, "these changes are accidental. But they are not accidental to the subject, for the subject is not an abstraction; he or she is a concrete reality, a being in the luminous of being" (314). Lonergan is speaking of the problem of permanence and change. Both a constant human nature and change are real.

Lonergan writes, "The being of the subject is becoming. One becomes oneself" (314). Lonergan seems to be saying that we are a potential self and that we become a self through our choices. We are born a subject, but we become ourselves through the use of reason, understanding, judging, choosing, and living the truth. "The subject has more and more to do with his own becoming" (315). A child resents when an adult does for them what they can do for themselves. People become themselves through human development. They develop through increasing what they can do for themselves, "that one decides for oneself, that one finds out for oneself" (315). People are growing up by doing more and more for themselves.

Lonergan states there comes a time when the "increasing autonomy subject ... finds out for himself that it is up to himself to decide what to make of himself" (315). It seems at first that the person's choosing and doing for themselves have to do with objects. "But on reflection it appears that deeds, decisions, discoveries affect the subject more deeply than they affect the objects with which they are concerned. They accumulate as dispositions and habits of the subject; they determine him or her; they make him or her what they are and what they are to be" (315). Our choices and actions affect not only objects, but ourselves too.

Early on the self makes itself; later on its choosing is "open-eyed, deliberate." Lonergan contrasts this with the drifter. It is the opposite of the "open-eyed" choosing. Lonergan writes, The drifter has not yet found himself; he has not yet discovered his own deed, and so is content with what everyone is doing; he has not yet discovered his own will, and so he is content to choose what everyone else is choosing; he has not yet discovered a mind of his own, and so he is content to think and to say what everyone else is thinking and saying; and the others too are apt to be drifters, each of them doing and choosing and thinking and saying what others happen to to be doing and choosing and thinking and saying" (315). It seems Lonergan is saying that the drifter does not have a self.

He is not saying that the autonomous self knows himself well. They cannot predict the future and are not in control of it. They are limited. They cannot control how the environment and outside influences "work on us." They cannot grasp their "unconscious and preconscious mechanisms." Their path is in the "night;" their control is only partial; they have to "believe and trust, to risk and dare" (315.

The historicity of our lives are "never transcended." Deciding what one is to become is not necessarily implementing it. What we decide today does not "predetermine the free choice of tomorrow," or months from now. What we accomplish "is always precarious: it can slip, fall, shatter. What is to be achieved can be ever expanding, deepening. To meet one challenge is to effect a development that reveals a further and graver challenge" (315-316). We do have freedom to make choices, but not everything is in our control. The world around us and people's actions affect us.