The Realms of Desire: An Introduction to the Thought of Bernard Lonergan

380 Pages·2011·3.76 MB·English

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE
THOUGHT OF BERNARD LONERGAN
BY THE FELLOWS OF THE WOODSTOCK THEOLOGICAL CENTER
THE REALMS OF DESIRE:
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE THOUGHT
OF BERNARD LONERGAN
By the Fellows of the
Woodstock Theological Center
THE WOODSTOCK THEOLOGICAL CENTER
at Georgetown University • Washington, DC
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Copyright © 2011 Woodstock Theological Center
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Woodstock Theological Center
Georgetown University, Box 571137
Washington, DC 20057-1137
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 3
1. The Realm of Common Sense ................................................................................... 13
2. The Realm of Theory ................................................................................................. 42
3. The Realm of Interiority: From Descartes to the German Idealists .................... 65
4. The Rise of Intentionality Analysis: From Schopenhauer to the Existentialists .. 98
5. The Realm of Interiority: Lonergan’s Intentionality Analysis ........................... 133
6. Intellectual Conversion............................................................................................ 190
7. The Realm of Transcendence.................................................................................. 233
8. The Realm of Art...................................................................................................... 284
9. The Centrality of History ........................................................................................ 317
10. Lonergan and the Ecological Crisis...................................................................... 347
EPILOGUE............................................................................................................. 362
BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................. 367
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Foreword
or decades, the thought of Bernard Lonergan has provided the
methodological foundation that undergirds all the research of the Woodstock
FTheological Center at Georgetown University. Woodstock’s Research
Fellows are unified in their commitment to carrying out “theological reflection on the
human problems of today”; but they come from diverse backgrounds, and are exploring
topics as varied as economic globalization, immigration, business ethics, science &
religion, education and urban issues, ecclesiology, interreligious dialogue, and the role of
faith in the public sphere.
Where can scholars from such diverse fields find a common language that allows
them to see their disciplines not as isolated silos of information, but simply as different
facets of a larger, unfolding truth that encompasses all our knowledge of God, Creation,
and humankind?
We have found the theological methodology of Bernard Lonergan invaluable, in
providing just that sort of conceptual ‘common ground’ for all of Woodstock’s projects.
In fact, we have made the exploration of Lonergan’s methodology (and adaptation of it
for Woodstock’s purposes) an ongoing, long-term initiative in which all the Center’s
Research Fellows participate, through our regular theological reflection seminar.
In 2007, the fruit of years’ worth of seminar conversations appeared in the form
of our book, The Dynamism of Desire: Bernard J. F. Lonergan on the Spiritual Exercises
of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Our seminar conversations during the following years have
now yielded the new text that we are delighted to present here, in partnership with
Marquette University and its groundbreaking efforts to make Lonergan’s thought
accessible online.
This work represents a collaborative effort of Woodstock’s Research Fellows,
whose thoughts and reflections appear throughout the text, and so greatly enrich it. Those
of us who played a role in producing and refining the text found the process immensely
meaningful; and we hope that in reading the text, you and scholars all around the world
will find it equally valuable. We are happy to be able to share it with you.
Gasper F. Lo Biondo, S.J.
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Introduction
I have a pretty fair mind. But Bernard Lonergan? Now there’s a mind!
John Courtney Murray
hirty six years ago both Time and Newsweek called attention to Bernard
Lonergan, a little known philosopher and theologian. Time reported that
Tmany intellectuals rank the Canadian Jesuit as “the finest theological
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thinker of the 20 century.” Newsweek pointed out that Lonergan’s life-long objective
was, like that of Aquinas, to appropriate “the best of secular knowledge into a higher
Christian synthesis.” In one “beefy volume”, it reported, Lonergan had succeeded in
providing an “understanding of understanding” which even Aquinas had failed to
achieve. His masterwork Insight throws light on the broad outlines of all there is to know
and reveals the “invariant pattern” of conscious operations that opens the way for future
advances in human knowledge. Protestant theologian Langdon Gilkey, a luminary at the
University of Chicago Divinity School at the time, seemed to agree. He saluted Lonergan
as “one of the great minds of Christendom,” and said “I used to read Jacques Maritain or
Etienne Gilson to find out what Roman Catholic intellectuals were thinking. Now I read
Father Lonergan to find out what I am thinking.” And Notre Dame’s David Burrell
undoubtedly spoke for many when he added, “The most important thing about Lonergan
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is that he liberates you to be — and to trust — yourself.” Newsweek concluded by
predicting that, given the dimensions of Lonergan’s achievement, it might well take
another generation for the full power of Lonergan’s thought to make itself felt within
Catholic circles and beyond.
The prediction has proved accurate. I reread the articles in Time and Newsweek
six years ago and immediately a swarm of questions arose. If Lonergan is the foremost
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theologian of the 20 century, why I wondered has he not been taken more seriously by
modern secular philosophers? For that matter, why has he not been taken more seriously
by Catholic philosophers and theologians? Why has Lonergan been taken up by so many
and then dropped? True, Lonergan centers have multiplied and now exist around the
world in places like Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington, and
Sydney. But there is nowhere near the widespread acceptance you might expect of one so
highly touted a generation ago. The puzzling fact is that within Catholic circles Lonergan
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remains more of a “cult figure” than a celebrity like Hans Küng, Edward Schillebeeckx,
or Karl Rahner. In 1976, for instance, Hugo Meynell wrote: “Of all contemporary
philosophers of the very first rank, Bernard Lonergan has been up to now the most
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neglected” and added that the neglect of his achievement remains “both astonishing and
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deplorable.” In 1998, in an article on Lonergan in One Hundred Twentieth Century
Philosophers, Hugh Bredin asserted: “Lonergan is regarded by some as having one of the
most powerful philosophical minds of the twentieth century, but he is not widely known
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outside Thomistic circles.” And this despite the judgment of the brilliant Jesuit
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theologian John Courtney Murray---the peritus chiefly responsible for Vatican II’s degree
on human liberty, who once remarked: “I have a pretty fair mind. But Bernard Lonergan?
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Now there’s a mind!” And finally, in May, 2001, at the first International Lonergan
Workshop and in the very great hall at the Gregorian University in Rome where
Lonergan taught for 26 years, Benedictine theologian Sebastian Moore noted with
sadness and disbelief in his voice that no professors at the Greg today use Lonergan in
their courses.
Who then is Bernard Lonergan? I asked myself. Is he really important or simply
one whose reputation could not stand up to the relentless winnowing of time? But if his
achievement is indeed significant, what precise contribution has he made? In particular,
anything of use to Christian leaders engaged in dialogue with contemporary secular
thinkers? Indeed, given the many problems facing the world today, my hope was that he
had some fresh and untried approach to a solution that merits the world’s attention.
Bernard Lonergan’s main contribution, to echo Newsweek, can best be summed
up in some such slogan as: Understand understanding and you will understand much of
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what there is to be understood. In the introduction to Insight Lonergan elaborated the
idea:
Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and not only will you
understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you
will possess a fixed base, an invariant pattern, opening upon all further
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developments of understanding.
“You will understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood”---an
extraordinary claim indeed; a claim that struck me as either hyperbolic or shot through
with hubris. But it was to substantiate the claim that Lonergan wrote Insight. He designed
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its first eight chapters, he said, as “a series of five-finger exercises” with one goal in
view: “to help people experience themselves understanding.” Carl Rogers, Lonergan
reminds us, had helped his clients “advert to the feelings that they experience but do not
advert to, distinguish, name, identify, recognize.” In the same way, Lonergan wished to
help his readers “advert to the experience of understanding” and then “distinguish it from
other experiences, name and identify it, and recognize it when it recurs.” To be able to
understand understanding or the process by which we come to understand, Lonergan
himself had engaged in a life-long examination of human consciousness and an analysis
of the various intentional operations within consciousness. In Insight Lonergan invites his
readers to join him in his extraordinarily brilliant examination of consciousness—what
philosophers today call intentionality analysis–-and discover first hand how their own
minds come to understand. To be brief, the aim of Insight is to convey insight into
insight.
Lonergan is not so much a genius with a new cognitional theory, I’m told by those
in the know, as “a guide” as to how all human beings think and decide on the way to full
adulthood. It was this that attracted Langdon Gilkey for one. Indeed Lonergan’s work has
a strong affinity with the work of Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, and Lawrence Kohlberg. He
was especially taken with Piaget’s painstaking research “on the representation of the
world in the child’s mind, on the language and thought of the child, on judgment and
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reasoning in the child, and on moral judgment in the child.” This enabled Piaget,
Lonergan writes, to present “an enormously detailed and at the same time a brilliantly
organized account of how the child develops, what the child can and cannot do at any
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stage, why there are different stages, and why the child can or cannot do these different
things at these different stages.” Annie Dillard’s brilliant evocation of An American
Childhood in Pittsburgh covers much the same ground and captures in magical language
“the passion of childhood” and “a child’s vigor, and originality, and eagerness, and
mastery, and joy.” She put in her memoir “what it was that had me so excited all the
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time—the sensation of time pelting me as if I were standing under a waterfall.”
What Piaget does for the child and Dillard in her memoir evokes in a more poetic
way, Lonergan intended to do for full human development. Development, he say, begins
with the sense of wonder. Spontaneously, we all “fall victim to the wonder that Aristotle
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named the beginning of all science and philosophy.” Upon reflection, one finds in
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oneself an “all-inclusive, immediate awareness of unrestricted wonder.” In each of us,
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then, there is “a deep-set wonder in which all questions have their source and ground.”
In other words, wonder is the spontaneous desire to understand. But it is never pure
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wonder; it is always “wonder about something.” In the child, for instance, “a secret
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wonder...rushes forth in a cascade of questions.” Annie Dillard is right on the mark
when she reports:
The little child pinches the skin on the back of her hand and sees where
God made Adam from spit and clay. The older child explores the city on
foot and starts to work on her future as a detective, or an epidemiologist,
or a painter. Older yet, she runs wild and restless over the city’s bridges,
and finds in Old Testament poetry and French symbolist poetry some
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language sounds she loves.”
And yet, to be clear, wonder about skin or streets or bridges is not the same as knowing.
We immediately and directly wonder about being or reality, says Lonergan, but we don’t
immediately or directly know being or reality. Wonder leads to intelligent inquiry.
Wonder asks What? and Why? What is this? Why is it what it is? Wonder then is not
knowing, but the potential to know and the curiosity it awakens spurs the quest for
understanding. Wonder wants answers and the answers if correct bring satisfaction and
the sheer joy of understanding.
Lonergan invites his readers to accompany him, in the words of a recent
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commentator Brian Cronin, on “a journey of self discovery.” You need not travel to
“some distant region of the globe,” Lonergan writes, nor share in “some strange and
mystical experience” No, he invites you to “pluck [his] general phrases from the dim
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world of thought to set them in the pulsing flow of life.” I can’t do that for you, he says;
you must do it yourself. But discover for yourself the process by which your own mind
works, the understanding it produces, and the verification process by which you can be
sure of the accuracy of your judgments and the validity of your decisions. Do that, and
you will have achieved the self-appropriation, says Cronin, that is “key to all of
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Lonergan’s thought and the strength of his position.”
All very interesting, I found myself thinking, but of what practical use can such
knowledge be? Lonergan, I find, has already met the objection head on: “Insight is the
source not only of theoretical knowledge but also of all its practical applications and,
indeed, of all intelligent activity.” It is his claim that “insight into insight...will reveal
what activity is intelligent, and insight into oversights will reveal what activity is
unintelligent.” In other words, “to be practical is to do the intelligent thing and to be
unpractical is to keep blundering about.” The upshot, for him, is that “insight into both
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insight and oversight is the very key to practicality.” I wanted to find out for myself the
crucial ways in which insight into insight is highly practical when there is a call for
judgment and decision.
I discovered early on that Lonergan’s intent during a life time of intellectual labor
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as a Christian philosopher and theologian was profoundly pastoral. Lonergan was
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always intensely interested in current events and their impact on human beings.
Lonergan would agree, for instance, with Isaiah Berlin and his postmodernist followers in
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their intellectual diagnosis of what Berlin calls the “great despotic visions” of the right
and left. However well-intentioned the seminal work of Fichte, Hegel and Marx from
which they emerge, such visions served to justify monstrous policies in the twentieth
century. Lonergan would, of course, emphatically disagree with the postmodernist
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solution that there are no solutions, a position first enunciated in nineteenth century
Russian thinker Alexander Herzen’s dismal pronouncement: “Do not look for solutions in
this book—there are none; in general modern man has no solutions.” But Lonergan
would concur with the contention that the Enlightenment with its uncritical faith in
reason produced the “materialist trinity” of absolute ideologies that have plagued the
contemporary world: “eighteenth century capitalism, nineteenth century communism and
twentieth century nazism.” In a 1942 book review, Lonergan wrote:
...Communism is a collectivist reaction against capitalist individualism;
nazism is a nationalist reaction against the international character of
finance and world revolution. Despite their differences and oppositions, all
three agree in their dedication of man, soul and body, to the goods of this
world. None of them acknowledges...a higher end....Their consequences
are not a matter of abstract deduction. The experiment has been performed
and still is being performed on the quivering body of humanity. The
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results are not pleasant.
It was this awareness of ghastly experiments carried out on “the quivering body of
humanity” that haunted Lonergan all his life and fired his passion to search for some
alternative and more persuasive, practical, and benign solutions to the economic and
political evils that bedevil the modern world .
In a lifetime of study, Bernard Lonergan retraced the remarkable journey of the
human mind and its passion for meaning from its beginnings in primitive man up until the
present day. Central to Lonergan’s story is the “unfolding of a single thrust, the eros of the
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human spirit,” that spirit of curiosity which wonders, inquires, and comes to understand,
judge, and decide. The eros, he maintains, is inbuilt: “to inquire and understand, to reflect
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and judge, to deliberate and choose” are as natural as the human need for “waking and
sleeping, eating and drinking, talking and loving.” The desire and drive to understand
provides the motive power that propels human beings to embark on what Lonergan calls
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this “sweet adventure.”
Let’s take a closer look. Only as the result of a prolonged development that spans
centuries, says Lonergan, has the human subject worked its way out of a state of
undifferentiated consciousness to arrive eventually at a state of differentiated
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consciousness. Lonergan warns that “the labor of self-appropriation cannot occur at a
single leap.” It involves “the development of the subject and in the subject and, like all
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development, it can be solid and fruitful only by being painstaking and slow.” There
was a famous cardiologist teaching at Georgetown University’s medical school in the