Lonergan's Critique of Reductionism Part 4

David W. Aiken, "Bernard Lonergan's Critique of Reductionism: A Call to Intellectual Conversion. Christian Scholars Review 233-251.

"Toward Intellectual Conversion: Reorienting One's Worldview"

Modern empiricism "characteristically regards direct acquaintance with sense-data as the paradigm of knowing, and more complex states as derived by psychological association or logical inference from empirical basis" (241). The more recent versions of the empirical theory "tend to favor externalistic over internalistic accounts of how true judgments are formed or justified, so that the emphasis now falls immediacy of believing in the rights kinds of perceptual stimuli" (241). However, knowing for Lonergan includes experiencing, understanding, and judgment. Experience is just one part of knowing. "Though the presentations of sense and imagination provide an essential point of of departure for higher cognitional operations--such as understanding, conceiving, and reflecting--it is only in and through a deliberate act of correct judgment, on the basis of sufficient evidence, that factual truth is acquired and cognition achieved" (241). 

In Lonergan's cognitional structure, "sense experience represents only one element in a complex pattern of operations the sum of which is knowledge" (241). Sense experience by itself does not equal knowledge. Knowledge requires attending to the data to get insight on what the data means. Once one understands, one then asks questions if it is so. If one determines it is so, then one makes the judgment or affirmation it is so. It is only when all the steps are obtained that knowledge is achieved. All the different steps uses sublation in that the higher level does not lose the lower level in higher integration. "Sublation is Lonergan's term for the process of directed development in which more advanced systems of richer significance and greater operational range emerge from the gradual expansion, and, at the limit of their capacity for optimal functioning, the eventual breakdown of prior systems" (242).

"Toward Appropriating One's Capacity for Self-Transcendence"

Lonergan describes understanding as it is experienced: "Deep within us all, emergent when the noise of other appetites is stilled, there is a drive to know, to understand, to see why, to discover the reason, to find the cause, to explain. Just what is wanted has many names. In what precisely it consists is a matter of dispute. But the fact of inquiry is beyond all doubt. It can absorb. It can keep for hours, day after day, year after year, in the narrow prison of study or laboratory. It can send on dangerous voyages of exploration. It can withdraw from other interests, other pursuits, other pleasures, other achievements. It can fill waking thoughts, hide from the world of ordinary affairs, invade the very fabric of dreams. It can demand endless sacrifices that are made without regret though there is only the hope, never a certain promise of success" (Insight, 28-29).

Lonergan is describing the act of understanding which "arises spontaneously" to release the "tension of inquiry" into an understanding of the data. The description of the act of understanding indicates that certain habits must be cultivated to pursue understanding. The learner must deny certain "self-centered concerns" to reach out for understanding or insight. Thus the very practice of pursuing knowledge calls for "a human capacity for self-transcendence" that might be considered "spiritual" (246).

Lonergan describes the relationship between knowing and being:

Being, then, is the objective of the pure desire to know.

By the desire to know is meant the dynamic orientation manifested in questions for intelligence and for reflection. It is not the verbal utterance of questions. It is not the conceptual formulation of questions. It is not any insight or thought. It is not any reflective grasp or judgment. It is the prior and enveloping drive that carries cognitional process from sense and imagination to understanding, from understanding to judgment, from judgment to the complete context of correct judgments that is named knowledge....

Because it differs radically from other desire, this desire has been called pure. It is to be known, not by misleading analogy of other desire, but by giving free rein to intelligent and rational consciousness. It is, indeed impalpable, but it is also powerful. It pulls out of the solid routine of perception and conation, instinct and habit, doing and enjoying. It holds with the fascination of problems. It engages in the quest of solutions....  It is the absorption of investigation, the joy of discovery, the assurance of judgment, the modesty of limited knowledge. It is the relentless serenity, the unhurried determination, the imperturbable drive of question following appositely on question in the genesis of truth. (Insight, 372-373).

In this passage, Lonergan connects eros not only with insight, but with the entire cognitional process from experiencing through understanding to judging. Second, he shows how this desire is different from the biological drive for survival. This is because in their calm, but "relentless pursuit of explanatory understanding might well find themselves obliged to curtail other entirely legitimate human interests" (247). Thirdly, this intellectual eros "transcends the immediacy and conation" (247).

Aiken said because of Lonergan's view of the cognitional process, reality cannot be pictured. 

Lonergan, in his later life would object to an "intellectualistic rendering" of this "unrestricted desire" for knowing. In his Method in Theology, he gives a more complex view of this process:

"The many levels of consciousness are just successive stages in the unfolding of a single thrust, the eros of the human spirit. To know the good it must know the real; to know the real it must know the true; to know the true, it must know the intelligible; to know the intelligible, it must attend to the data. So from slumber, we awake to attend. Observing lets intelligence be puzzled and we inquire. Inquiry leads to delight of insight, but insights are a dime a dozen so critical reasonableness doubts, checks, makes sure. Alternative courses of action present themselves and we wonder whether the more attractive is the truly good. Indeed, so intimate is the relation between successive transcendental notions, that it is only by a specialized differentiation of consciousness that we withdraw from more ordinary ways of living to devote ourselves to a moral pursuit of goodness, a philosophic pursuit of truth, a scientific pursuit of understanding, an artistic pursuit of beauty" (Method in Theology, 13).

Lonergan "extrapolated" from our different capacities for self-transcendence "toward their distinct transcendental horizons (goodness, truth, intelligibility, beauty)," Lonergan will later show the religious significance of this eros of the human spirit. It is a quest for the transcendent, holiness. It is holiness that is the fulfillment of this human desire:

"[The question of God] is not a matter of feeling, of concept or judgment. They pertain to answers. It is a question. It arises out of our conscious intentionality, out of the a priori structured drive that promotes us from experiencing to the effort to understand, from understanding to the effort to judge truly, from judging to the effort to choose rightly. In the measure that we avert to our own questioning and proceed to question it, there arises the question of God. ... The question of God, then lies within [our] horizon. [our] transcendental subjectivity is mutilated or abolished, unless stretching forth towards the intelligible, the unconditioned, the good of value. The reach, not of attainment, but of intending is unrestricted. There lies within [our] horizon a region for the divine, a shrine for ultimate holiness. It cannot be ignored. The atheist may pronounce it empty. The agnostic may urge that he finds his investigation has been inconclusive. The contemporary humanist will refuse to allow the question to arise. But their negations presuppose the spark in our clod, our native orientation to the divine" (Method in Theology, 103).

Lonergan's Insight and Method in Theology provides a connection between the "cognitional and theological significance of the spiritual eros" (249). Aiken adds, "Not only does the unrestricted scope of this desire prefigure the existence of God whose unlimited intelligence grounds the the inexhaustible intelligibility of the cosmos," it creates an openness to God, and to a "Word from God, should one be spoken interiorly or historically" (249). Since our "primordial wondering always and already orients itself toward an unlimited intelligibility, goodness, and generosity," it tells us how we are situated in the world with an ever unfolding "universe of being" (249). As our questions for intelligence "expands," also does our potential for self-transcendence, and encountering God.

God is more than our quest for self-transcendence or the answers to our questioning. Lonergan qualifies how we understand the encounter with God: "As the question of God is implicit in all our questioning, so being in love with God is the basic fulfillment of our conscious intentionality. That fulfillment brings a deep-set joy that can remain despite humiliation, failure, privation, pain, betrayal, desertion. That fulfillment brings a radical peace, the peace the world cannot give. That fulfillment bears fruit in love of one's neighbor that strives mightily to bring the kingdom of God on earth. On the other hand, the absence of that fulfillment opens the way to trivilization of human life in the pursuit of fun, to the harshness of human life arising from the ruthless exercise of power, to despair about human values springing from the conviction that the universe is absurd" (Method in Theology,  105). 

"The dynamics of nature" responding to the nature of grace is an example of grace perfecting nature which is another response to reductionism. Grace does not abolish nature, but fulfills it. Lonergan has gone from questioning our experiences to encountering the divine. Is Lonergan's theory of cognition be true? Lonergan states that each person will need to answer this question himself by reflecting on his own cognitional experiences: "Does this many-leveled subject exist? [one] has to answer this question for oneself. But I do not think the answers are in doubt. Not even behaviorists claim that they are unaware whether or not they see, hear, taste or touch. Not even positivists preface their lectures and their books with the frank avowal that never in their lives did they have the experience of understanding anything whatever. Not even relativists claim that never in their lives did they have the experience of making a rational judgment. Not even determinists claim that never in their lives did they have the experience of making a responsible choice. There exist subjects that are empirically, intellectually, rationally and morally conscious. Not all know themselves as such, for consciousness is not human knowing. But all can know themselves as such, for they have only to attend to what they already conscious of, and understand what they attend to, and pass judgment on the correctness of their understanding" ("Cognitional structure," Collection, 210-211).

By going through this exercise, one should get the insight that there is an affirmation of the cognitional operations Lonergan identified in one's own consciousness. By this affirmation, one is affirming Lonergan's "holistic ontology of the subject" (251). By making this judgment, one is siding with intellectual conversion against reductionism.