Taylor and Lonergan Part 2

"Taylor and Lonergan: Dialogue and Dialectic" in Brian J. Braman, Meaning and Authenticity: Bernard Lonergan and Charles Taylor on the Drama of Human Existence. University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Cognitional Theory

Lonergan's cognitional theory is a dynamically, "self-assembling" process in which different levels of operations bring forth other levels until the process is complete. The operators of this process are "questions for intelligence, reflection, and deliberation" (79). These operators build on the level experience (senses), "yield" four different levels of consciousness. Each higher level sublates the lower level. 

Taylor's account of self-transcendence is more categorized by "hermeneutics of judgments." Taylors thinks that we experience the world as "worded": "Our world is always a foreground for us through interpretations" (79). Taylor thinks that even in our conditions of intentionality that our "theoretical stance to the world, we are agents ... coping with things ... Once we take this point, then the entire epistemological position is undermined. Obviously foundationalism goes, since our representations of things - are grounded in the way we deal with things" (79). Taylor thinks intentional analysis is an "existential hermeneutics of objects," an intentional consciousness that is aware of something in one's horizon. "Our perception of the world is essentially that of an embodied agent, engaged with or at grips with the world" (79-80). Basically, "consciousness as perception objectifies what it is aware of" (80). Lonergan thinks of perception as an experience through experiential patterns that gives us data, and these data must be questioned to acquire understanding or insight. Taylor emphasizes how the hermeneutics of objects provides a framework of meaning. Lonergan thinks afuller account can be given of self-transcendence: 

"Again, when we analyze operations as conscious we begin with conscious operations as intentional (perceiving, wondering about, understanding, criticizing this or that object) ... But this is only part of what is involved in our asking and answering questions as we come to know. As our explicit awareness of both the subject-pole and object-pole of our conscious intending expands, it will inevitably lead to our realizing the historical conditionedness of our conscious acts. Thus we become increasingly aware of the formative influence upon us of emotions, of the way we are peculiarly conditioned by our intellectual, social, cultural, aesthetic, moral and spiritual development. In brief intentionality analysis naturally expands to horizon analysis" (80).

Lonergan begins his analysis with the "polymorphous existential subject, and by generalized empirical method lays bare the immanent and operative dynamism of conscious intentionality ... He goes beyond the horizons of the truncated, immanentist, and alienated subjects to disclose a total viewpoint that, precisely because it gets beyond those other foreshortened or distorted horizons, is basic yet not foundationalist" (80). In other words, Lonergan's cognitional theory and intentional analysis is not another form of foundationalism.

Lonergan's method is empirical because he is attending to sense data, but understanding, judging, deciding, and loving is added as operators to the process. Lonergan thinks of knowledge as performative: "it is the knowledge of the subject  in act and not as an object" (81). Though we speak of cognitional operators of experience, understanding, judging, and deciding, these "operations are conditioned by prior operations and fraught with contingency" (81). The operations are threatened by different biases and the actions of individuals are not uniform. In addition, the desire for knowledge compete with other legitimate desires. Lonergan takes the postmodern turn "by showing that true self-transcendence is manifested in act" (81). Lonergan, like Heidegger, "insists that as intelligent, reasonable, and responsible, we finite beings use language to get beyond ourselves in knowing reality and transforming it" (81).

Both Lonergan and Taylor states that our identity is "constituted by a horizon," a person being-in-the-world. As the person's horizon expands, so does the subject: "The broadening, deepening, developing of the horizon, world, blik is also the broadening, deepening of the subject, the self, the ego. The development that is the constitution of one's world is also the constitution of one's self" (81). How one understands oneself, one's identity is never separated from one's horizon. One must understand one's world to understand one's self, and this understanding is "never exhausted, nor is it ever a thing to be possessed in some final way" (82).