Lonergan, Meaning and Method

Philosophical Essays

Andrew Beards

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781501341243
• eBook ISBN: 9781501318672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Analytic Philosophy

Bernard Lonergan (1904-84) is acknowledged as one of the most significant philosopher-theologians of the 20th century. Lonergan, Meaning and Method in many ways complements Andrew Beards' previous book on Lonergan, Insight and Analysis (Bloomsbury, 2010). Andrew Beards applies Lonergan's thought and brings it into critical dialogue and discussion with other contemporary philosophical interlocutors, principally from the analytical tradition. He also introduces themes and arguments from the continental tradition, as well as offering interpretative analysis of some central notions in Lonergan's thought that are of interest to all who wish to understand the importance of Lonergan's work for philosophy and Christian theology. Three of the chapters focus upon areas of fruitful exchange and debate between Lonergan's thought and the work of three major figures in current analytical philosophy: Nancy Cartwright, Timothy Williamson and Scott Soames. The discussion also ranges across such topics as meaning theory, metaphilosophy, epistemology, philosophy of science and aesthetics.

1

Generalized Empirical Method

Arguably one of the most off-putting aspects for many encountering Lonergan’s work at this time in our cultural history is his attachment to the word method as a designation for the path he identifies for fruitful discovery and exploration in both philosophy and theology. Is not a work emblematic of our current cultural moment Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method? H. G. Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode is somewhat ironic in its inclusion of method in its title since it also is an argument to counter the methods for discovering truth vaunted in their putative exclusivity by the creators and scions of the Enlightenment. The story of Anglo-Saxon twentieth-century philosophy is also one of increasing disenchantment with the deductive methods elaborated as systems of symbolic logic over a century ago in a phase of overweening confidence in their ability to sort out once and for all the sheep from the goats of meaningful and meaningless discourse.

Yet, Lonergan’s attachment to the epithet method is perhaps potentially all the more effective as a philosophical maieutic precisely because of this provocative aspect. If someone asks me ‘Do you know where my toothbrush is?’ or ‘Have you read Critchley on Žižek?,’ I may – making the question immediately my own in consciousness – answer, perhaps, ‘No’ and ‘Yes’, respectively. If I am not joking but sincere, I will be aware of what I take to be the evidence I have in mind for the respective answers. But evidently, the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ as conscious performances are distinct from, yet related to, the evidence I have in mind to back them up and also from the question I am asked – which I at once make my own – but are related also to it. Further, I may be aware, in certain circumstances, that I have actively to attend to what the questions were about and make the effort to reflect a little on how I will respond. Now perhaps to give such mundane and quotidian events and processes the grandiose title of ‘Method’ will seem too overblown. But it is Lonergan’s contention that great lessons may ultimately be drawn from apparently insignificant features of our conscious lives.¹ By teasing out further similar details of consciousness and asking us to verify whether or not we do find them in conscious life, Lonergan develops his philosophical method, then taken up into further and fuller contexts including that of theology.

This ‘method’ of our intelligent, reasonable and responsible conscious activities is operative, so he argues, in the most recondite and convoluted of intellectual endeavours as in the most simple and everyday. It is the method deployed by every deconstructionist or antideconstructionist, and accordingly, Hugo Meynell, inspired by the satirical wit of Anthony Trollope, suggests the method be characterized as one of ‘archdeaconstruction.’² Surely, aspirant comedian-philosophes such as Slavoj Žižek may be enticed to participate in the experiment when it is proffered seasoned with such delicious humour?

Lonergan’s principal lifelong project was to develop a method for theology. In Insight, he laid the groundwork for doing this by working out a method for philosophy. In so doing, he not only offered a methodological approach to arguing for a sound philosophy, which would be sublated or taken over into theology to be applied in the myriad ways in which, explicitly, theology does in fact apply philosophy in its work, but also in an even deeper and broader way Lonergan had sketched out a method, a way, of authentic self-appropriation that the theologian too can follow to better identify what is operative in his or her mind and heart. The book Insight is itself the result of the years Lonergan devoted to ‘reaching up to the mind of Aquinas’ and behind Insight stand, among other writings, Lonergan’s doctoral work and the Verbum articles. Verbum, Insight and these other works are the fruit of Lonergan’s own self-appropriation of his intellectual, moral and affective intentionality as this occurred principally through his study of Aquinas, but also as a result of his work on other thinkers, notably St. Augustine and Bl. Newman, and through his immersion in the world of modern mathematics, physical science and hermeneutics. Empirical method, already referred to in the Verbum articles,³ had in modernity become synonymous with the method of the physical sciences; the technological improvements that these sciences had brought about in the industrial revolution had elevated them to a status in Western culture to which their forbear, the old natural philosophy, could never have aspired. As a result, and for other cultural reasons, the ‘scientistic philosophies’ of empiricism (in epistemology) and materialism (in metaphysics), philosophical options since ancient philosophy, appeared with a new lustre and aspired to achieve cultural hegemony, replacing the religious worldview of Christianity. The appeal to experience, to controllable experiment as seen to be opposed to jejune and ideal speculation, would rid the civilized world of dangerous and superstitious flights of fancy. Such was the cultural manifesto of the Enlightenment. A paradigmatic example of this new vision for true progress is identified by Lonergan in the ground rules laid by the English Royal Society, one of the new scientific collaborative communities appearing across Europe, in its constitutions written in the 1660s.⁴ Theories are to be admitted for consideration only if they are empirically testable. Of course, as those familiar with current philosophy of science well know, just how empirically testable a given scientific theory is in practice and whether in the history of science an immediate rush to cast aside all and only those that are not validated empirically has been evident in every case are complex questions. Nevertheless, any critical realist approach to physical science, such as would be implied in Lonergan’s philosophy, would insist that in the long run, empirical test is a crucial factor in evaluating whether or not we may claim that a given scientific theory is probably true of reality (with greater or lesser degrees of probability to be assigned to this rational estimation). Arguments in support of such a position are furnished by the canons of empirical inquiry Lonergan works out in Insight, taken together with other arguments in his work for critical realism.⁵

On the other hand, Lonergan was equally convinced that arguments appealing to experience, to be settled by critical experiment on the basis of the relevant data, were central to the hermeneutical work through which he laboured to reach up to the mind of Aquinas and bring the fruits of that labour to bear in a philosophy adequate to the level of the times. These times were characterized not only by the cultural dominance of empirical science, but also by the dissemination of the fruits of the other science, La Scienza Nuova, of Vico: the hermeneutical ‘science’ bringing about an increasing awareness of the diversity of human cultures across time and space. As is clear from the mid-1930s onwards, Lonergan’s own appropriation of Aquinas, and through that appropriation his own further self-appropriation, was effected through his reading of St. Augustine and Bl. Newman. Their phenomenological approach allowed Lonergan to evaluate what he read in St. Thomas and Aristotle on the basis of critical experiments appealing to self-conscious experience. Thus, the hermeneutical circle, ever widening or spiralling, constituted by the interpreter’s self-appropriation as point of entry into the reading of Aristotle and St. Thomas, could itself be critically assessed and expanded through that reading. That this circle was not vicious but virtuous could be validated, at the limit, through self-verifying or self-contradicting arguments that themselves rested on the foundation of really and truly known cognitional activities. Knowing these cognitional activities and their dynamic interrelation was a case of knowing reality, being, and since this knowing occurs through the repeated application of the self-same intelligent and reasonable operations, such knowing is no different in general form from the knowing of being, reality aspired to in common sense and in every other form of cognitive endeavour.

This allowed Lonergan to critically assess and appropriate, through a hermeneutic of retrieval and suspicion, the enduring and positive fruits of the labours of Aristotle and Aquinas in philosophy, theology, metaphysics and in their own thoughts and practice concerning method. In his lectures, Lonergan in the 1950s and 1960s drew attention to texts in which Aquinas explicitly refers to the conscious experience of the individual in order to validate a philosophical claim,⁶ and in his 1967 Introduction to the publication of the Verbum articles in book form, Lonergan describes the way in which he drew out an implicit phenomenology of self-knowing from the texts of Aristotle and St. Thomas, to make it an explicit tool for critically assessing and appropriating their thought.⁷ In this journey of self-discovery, at once a discovery of the genius of these giants of the intellectual tradition, the contributions of modern science and mathematics proved vital. In turn, the fruits of the appropriation of the philosophical and theological past would enable Lonergan to focus in a new way on the metho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Generalized Empirical Method
• 2 Knowledge and Our Limits: Lonergan and Williamson
• 3 Aesthetics: Insights from Eldridge, Aquinas and Lonergan
• 4 Cartwright, Critical Realism and the Laws of Science
• 5 Scott Soames on Meaning: A Critical Realist Response
• 6 Lonergan on Meaning
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright