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Foundations of
Philosophy
9
Intellectual Conversion
The transition from the neglected and truncated subject to self-appropriation
is not a simple matter. It is not just a matter of finding out and assenting to
a number of true propositions. More basically, it is a matter of conversion, of
a personal philosophic experience, of moving out of a world of sense and of
arriving, dazed and disorientated for a while, into a universe of being.1
Preliminary Exercises
- Is space real? If God were to remove all the matter and energy from the
universe would there be empty space left over?
- Are relations of cause and effect real? If a football player kicks the ball
and it moves, how do you know that he is the cause? Can you see him causing
the ball to move? Can you see causes? [280]
- An old Latin tag says, Actio in distans absolute repugnat, namely,
action at a distance is absolutely impossible. How does gravity work across
the absolute vacuum of space?
- Do Newton's laws of motion belong only in the mind or do they belong somehow
to matter in the real world also?
- Is there a fundamental difference between a complicated machine and a live
worm? What is the difference?
- Where is the human soul located? In the heart? In the head? Wholly present
everywhere in the body?
1. Dialectic
In the previous chapter we considered the proximate criterion of truth,
namely, the imperatives that are operative in the immediate context of
considering data, understanding correlations and verifying conclusions. Mistakes
do occur in that context but the self-correcting process of knowing usually
kicks in; we can recognize and correct our mistakes, learn from them and so
attain truth. Having noted that judgments depend also on a larger context, in
this instance we are concerned, not with the proximate context of other
judgments, but with the remote context of desires, ambitions, expectations
motivating the person in the search for truth. For Lonergan the remote criterion
of truth is the proper unfolding of the pure detached unrestricted desire to
know.2 What that proper unfolding is
will be examined in this chapter. We are human persons; we are a whole of many
parts; intellect is one potential among many; the desire to know is one desire
among many other desires. Just as our knowing is an achieved synthesis of sense
and intellect, so the unfolding of the desire to know is an achieved balance
between the many sometimes conflicting desires of the human heart.
Much needs to be said - and done - about the appropriation of our desires,
feelings and actions.3 In the
interests of doing one thing well, we have concentrated until now on the
self-appropriation of the process of knowing. However, the deepest source of
division, controversy and misunderstanding arises not out of the immediate [281]
context of cognitional structure but out of the remote context of the drives,
anticipations, and presuppositions underlying our search for understanding. The
most radical distortion of understanding comes from twisted motivations and
mistaken imaginative anticipations. Our method of self-appropriation can help us
to recognize and purge these unconscious and unquestioned background influences.
We will consider bias and the hermeneutic of suspicion when we deal with
normative objectivity (chapter ten). Here we concentrate on the most basic
dialectic involved in the search for knowledge: the presence or absence of
intellectual conversion.4
There is a radical dualism at the heart of knowing which we have noticed in
passing already in this text: sense knowing and intellectual knowing,
imagination and intellect, the animal criterion of the real and the human
criterion, the >body >
and the thing. It is time to examine these explicitly in order to pin down this
dialectic which is at the heart of the unfolding of the desire to know.
A dialectic, in the sense we are using here, is the unfolding of two linked
but opposed principles. It is development by way of a tension of opposites.5
The two principles are linked together and unfold in relation to one another. We
are not aiming at eliminating one at the expense of the other but of maintaining
the tension, discriminating between them, pivoting from one to the other,
harmonizing their various activities. We can distinguish sense knowing and human
intellectual knowing as the two dialectical principles at work here. We are both
animal and rational; we are a unity in tension. Neither term can be eliminated.
We grow and develop through the tension of opposites rather than becoming either
animals or angels.
We have taken issue with various philosophers on particular points in a
specific context. Now it is time to go to the root of philosophical differences
and controversies. It is hard to accuse such great philosophers as Descartes,
Hume and Kant of being inattentive, unintelligent, or unreasonable, yet we do
claim that they are basically and fundamentally wrong in their theories about
human knowing. How can this be? Our answer is that at the very root of
philosophical differences are unquestioned presuppositions and anticipations of
what human knowing must be like. In this chapter [282] we try to uncover those
false assumptions and put them in dialectical contrast with our own position.
The theme of intellectual conversion is not a new topic that we meet here for
the first time; it is what we have been working at since the beginning of this
text. We are now in a position to face it head on explicitly with hope that you
are in a position to understand. Working through the exercises you may have
become aware of being introduced to a new way of looking at things and you may
have realized the enormous importance of some of the insights that you have had.
What we have been working towards is a full implementation of what we are now
going to call intellectual conversion. In this chapter we will try to
encapsulate the transition to intellectual conversion, to thematize it, to help
you recognize it as it happens in your own experience.
Perhaps it will seem a bit unusual to use the word 'conversion' in the
context of a philosophy of understanding. We are accustomed to encountering the
word conversion in the context of religion or moral activity. In such usage
'conversion' signifies a major turnaround in our moral or religious behavior. We
associate conversion with decisions to lead a good life, to change from one
religion to another, to take seriously the demands of a religious creed.
Similarly, we will show that intellectual conversion is a major turnaround in
our way of thinking about the world, and that it can be legitimately and
helpfully referred to as a conversion.
We are no longer talking about a single insight, or even about a single
higher viewpoint. We are not talking about looking at things from different
points of view, discovering new theories, or even what has been referred to as
paradigm shifts. We are not now talking about particular theoretical
developments. We are talking about rejection of the myth that knowing is like
looking, and about implementing fully the implications of the idea that the real
is the verified.
A conversion is a turning away from and a turning to. It is a radically new
beginning, not just a new area of research but a new way of thinking about
things. It is a change in the criteria that we use to determine what counts as
human knowing. It is a radical break-through in the fundamental area of how we
know at all. We [283] will be using many metaphors and images to try to express
this but the crucial thing is, as always, not so much to look at the words in
the book as to refer them to your own experience of some of the shifts suggested
in earlier chapters. This involves a radical transformation of our way of
sorting out what is true from what is false.
We might characterize this shift in terms of a vertical horizon change. A
horizon is the limit of our viewpoint, the way we customarily approach things,
the categories into which we fit our experiences. These horizons can develop
horizontally or vertically. Horizontal developments are such that development
takes place along a certain line, the horizon is being expanded but within the
same bounds. Changes in the horizons take place, more information is added but
the horizons remain intact. There is continuity with the previous horizons. But
there are also vertical shifts of horizon when the horizon framework itself is
radically overhauled and changed, where there is little continuity with the
previous horizon, where there is a real challenge to shift into a new way of
thinking. A new sequence begins, something new is born.
This involves a personal decision. It may not be the kind of moral or
religious decision involved in turning away from sin and believing the gospel,
but there has to be a willingness to change and an acceptance of the challenge
and the invitation of intellectual conversion. Teachers will often reflect sadly
that you can bring a horse to the water but you can't make him drink. You can do
so much for students but in the end it is their decision what they are going to
do with your pedagogical pearls. Some will be too lazy to do the work required
on their own. Some will resist change simply out of stubbornness, fear of the
unknown, or resentment. Some will misunderstand what is required and fall into
subjectivism or whatever. Some will grasp what is required but decide that that
is not their vocation in life and turn to more practical areas. Teaching is an
invitation that is conditional on willing acceptance.
There is a startling strangeness about the world of intellectual conversion,
rather like suddenly seeing the world for the first time even though we have
been living in it all our lives. It is not in any way an exotic or mystical
experience, simply an experience of liberation from confusion and skepticism
into a knowing that this is [284] it. It is the experience of Plato's cave man
liberated from the darkness and exposed to the light of the noon day sun - as
long as we realize that the light is not the light of the sun but of insights
and judgments.
We will approach the subject using four terminologies, each of which says the
same thing in a different way. Hopefully these four approaches will complement
one another and at least one will succeed in communicating the full message. The
important thing is to focus on relating these accounts to your own cognitive
history so as to identify the beginnings of intellectual conversion in your own
life. Hence we will study, from >body'
to thing; from naive realism to critical realism; from >looking=
to judgment; and from the world of immediacy to the world mediated by meaning.
2. From 'Body' to Thing
If you reflect on the process of solving some of the puzzles presented in the
preliminary exercises you might wonder why did it take so long. Presented with a
problem like the fish (chapter two) we automatically assume that to reverse the
fish the tail must become the head. But that doesn't work, no matter how hard we
try. It is only when imagination allows us to consider other possibilities that
we get it. The difficulty is in breaking free from unquestioned imaginative
assumptions as to where the solution lies. Similarly, when asked to join nine
points with four lines drawn continuously (chapter two), we automatically assume
that the lines must be within the square represented by the points. You can try
within those assumptions but you will never solve the problem. Again the
breakthrough is to extend lines outside the square and then you get it.
Unquestioned imaginative presuppositions are a block to the solution. If you
examine other problems you will recognize these blocks to understanding at work.
If you ask your bridge partner why he did not lead a spade he may reply, 'Oh, I
didn't think of that!' meaning actually that he did not imagine
the possibility. We understand what imagination presents to us; if it is not
presented it cannot be understood.6
[285]
A similar block exists when we ask questions about human understanding.
Powerful, unquestioned, imaginative presuppositions impose on our thinking like
blinkers on a horse. These assumptions are dangerous and powerful precisely
because they are unquestioned; if they were the result of questioning, you could
name them, evaluate and discriminate between them. Because they are unquestioned
they continue to exert a powerful background influence frustrating the finding
of the correct solution. The predominant unquestioned image concerning knowing
is that it is some kind of contact or bridge between a subject 'in the mind' and
an object 'outside the mind.' Intellectual conversion involves questioning,
identifying and breaking this imaginative presupposition which distorts all
considerations about knowing.
1. Animal 'knowing'. Animals live in the biological pattern of
experience. They have five external senses and they do have a limited ability to
remember, to imagine and to coordinate responses to different stimuli. Their
particular interests are very limited and specialized. The whole orientation of
their sensing is to successful survival and the satisfaction of basic needs, to
protection and the preservation of life. Animal sensation can be sharper, more
sensitive, more specialized, than our own human sensing.
We can talk about 'animal knowing' in the restricted sense of a knowing
limited to sense or to experience. But it is a knowing that is preintellectual
and preconceptual. Animals do not have insights and they do not make judgments.
We may speak of some animals as being intelligent and others as being dumb, but
this is a very loose use of the word intelligence; few would put animals in the
same category as humans when it comes to intelligence. There is a limited
learning in animals, based on principles of stimulus and response, which can be
satisfactorily explained in terms of the biological pattern of experience of
sensitive living.
Animals recognize objects and that is what we mean by 'body'. Dogs recognize
their masters; cats recognize mice; a kitten will recognize a saucer of milk; a
male weaverbird will recognize a female weaverbird. But again what we mean by
recognize here is simply at the level of physical seeing with a minimal
reference to memory, to imagination and to instinct. Animals recognize 'bodies';
[286] they recognize what can be sensed and what comes with the orbit of their
needs and the imperatives of survival. It is a purely sense knowing.
Let us characterize this elementary knowing as 'the already, out, there, now,
real' of the 'body'. An animal finds the world already constituted; there
is no transition from potentially intelligible to actually intelligible; the
animal does not grasp intelligible relations, causes, species: it sees what is
there to be seen; it just opens its eyes and sees; it is automatic, at the level
of sensation. There is no process of questioning, insights, hypotheses, and
judgments. The 'body' is 'already' there.
The orientation of this elementary knowing is outwards to the
environment. Animals do not have identity crises or epistemological problems,
and do not reflect on their destiny or lot. The senses are oriented outwards
towards external objects. What is real for the animal is an object of sense and
it is real if it comes within the range of the interests of survival. It is there
now in the sense that animals have to situate 'bodies' in time and place;
they live predominantly in the present. They do not have an abstract notion of
space and time.
Animals do have a criterion of the real. They can distinguish between a
saucer of milk and a picture of a saucer of milk. They can often distinguish
between a man and a scarecrow; they can sense traps, fear guns, suspect an
unfamiliar smell, etc. Their elementary knowledge is often highly successful and
ensures that they preserve their niche in the ecological system. What is real is
what can be sensed and what is important in the biological pattern of
experience. Animal sensing is dominated by the external senses and the
predominant orientation of their sensing toward the already, out, there, now,
real.
2. Human knowing. Human knowing, as we have seen, is by way of questions,
insights and judgments. We already distinguished the insight into the thing and
the insight into properties; most of the insights which we have considered
concerned laws, conjugates, properties, solutions to puzzles. These kinds of
insights focus on one aspect of the data to seek the intelligibility immanent in
that particular data. [287]
But there is an insight that takes the individuality of the thing into
account and where all the properties of the concrete thing are relevant. We
recognize things by having an insight into the unity and wholeness of the data
that pertains to that particular object. There is an insight into properties
that is abstractive; there is an insight into a thing that is inclusive,
grasping the unity, identity, whole in all the data. It is by way of insight
that we recognize the difference between satellites, planets, shooting stars and
fixed stars. It is by way of insight that we recognize the difference between
oxygen and carbon dioxide, between the black smoke of a flame that is unburned
carbon and the white smoke of a just extinguished candle that is vaporized wax.
This is what we mean by a thing, a unity, identity, whole grasped by insight.
It is an object of human knowing. It is known by a particular kind of insight
into the concrete, individual identity and wholeness of the thing. We do
distinguish different substances even though they look very much alike, such as
sugar and salt, a real person and a dummy in a shop window, food and a picture
of food, between malaria and typhoid even though they may produce the same
symptoms. Chemistry distinguishes the hundred elements and the millions of
compounds; botany distinguishes between the different genera and species of
plant life. These are distinctions between things and they are verifiable. Some
classifications have been abandoned in favor of better ones, ones that satisfy
the data better. The four elements of earth, air, fire and water of the Greeks
have been replaced with the periodic table of the elements on the basis of
countless experiments into the properties of different subdivisions of the crude
Greek categorization. They are verified not by sense differences but by way of
insights and judgments.
In the intellectual pattern of experience, then, we ask questions about the
data given in our experience of the world; we formulate possible explanations as
to why things are like that; and finally we check as to whether these possible
explanations can be verified. We proceed by raising further questions about
these and related matters to build up a system of verified terms and relations
that constitutes an organized scientific knowledge of some particular area of
experience. Our developing understanding pivots from the thing [288] understood
as a whole to properties of the thing which we compare with other data; from
terms to relations and from relations to terms.
3. Distinction not elimination. We have outlined two kinds of knowing;
the elementary sense knowing of 'bodies' of the animals and the intelligent
verifiable knowledge of things in insights and judgments. The problem is that we
as human beings start predominantly in the biological pattern of experience and
only move gradually and partially into the intellectual pattern of experience.
We are animals and have inherited the senses of animals and operate first on the
criterion of the real which goes with the biological pattern of experience.
Emerging within that, we have the transforming influence of intelligence
directing our attention, going beyond our senses to the intelligible, and
implementing a new criterion of the real as what is known in correct judgments.
The difficulty is that the two kinds of knowing, of 'bodies' and of things, are
almost inevitably confused. It is only with the greatest difficulty that we have
been able to disentangle the different threads. It is only after the exercises
and explanations of this book or similar books that we can even approach the
subject of 'bodies' and things with some hope of being understood.
Both kinds of knowing are successful in their own way, according to their own
criteria. The elementary knowing of animals is highly successful in complicated
operations such as building nests, or webs, finding food in the oddest of
places, mating patterns and rituals that ensure the survival of the species.
Elementary knowing is valid if it succeeds in helping the animal to survive and
thrive in its particular niche.
Human knowing is valid in its more complicated way, if it is verified in
instances. Its criterion is the virtually unconditioned; it constitutes valid
knowing if there is a link between the conditions and the conditioned and if the
conditions are fulfilled. We know we are right if no further pertinent questions
arise. The matter is closed off, we move on to other questions.
What is needed is not the elimination of either of the two kinds of knowing
but their critical distinction. What is needed is to be able to see that there
are two criteria of the real and where each operates. That is what we have been
getting at and that is one way of [289] describing intellectual conversion. It
is recognizing that the criterion of the real in true human knowing is
verification and judgment while the criterion of the real in elementary animal
knowing is sense and imagination of the 'already out there now real'.
4. Confusion. The biological pattern of experience can be so dominant in
our psyche that we assume that criterion of the real into what is supposed to be
fully human knowing. Most people survive in a sort of in-between world; they
have a great respect for Science but are frankly doubtful about the reality of
those abstruse theories and laws. This does not do much damage in ordinary
everyday life but can be disastrous if it introduced to science and philosophy.
The survival of unquestioned assumptions, expectations and presuppositions of
elementary knowing in what is supposed to be fully human knowing is the source
of endless confusion.
The majority of scientists and philosophers have not learned to distinguish
these two criteria and thus live in a kind of confusion of the two criteria.
Newton is a good example of a scientist who insisted that the basic principle of
science is that everything must be verifiable and verified; he implemented this
principle rigorously until he came to the question of space and time. Certain
relations of space and time that could be verified he called relative space and
time, because there was always some relation by which the space and time was
defined and verified. But he was unable to accept this as the whole story; his
imagination and expectation was so strong that he was forced to postulate an
absolute space and time which was not relative. Although Newton claimed to
verify this postulation by means of the bucket experiment,7
this was just rationalization. Absolute space and time is an example of the
'already out there now real' of animal knowing. Newton's expectation that to be
real something must be touchable or seeable or imaginable was so strong that he
could not believe that the reality of space and time was fully encapsulated in
his laws and relations of motion and time. His absolute space is the invisible
intangible empty receptacle which Plato imagined preexisted the work of the
Demiurge in the formation of the world.
5. Unverifiable Images. Closely related to this is the question of the
unverifiable images. We have already seen that in the field of [290] descriptive
relations there are verifiable images, as we are by definition relating things
to our senses. But we also saw that in the field of explanation there are no
verifiable images because by definition we are relating things to one another.
On the criterion of the out there now real, this is unacceptable. If
something is real it has to be imaginable; the image is the criterion of the
real. Atoms are little marbles, particles constituted by a nucleus with
electrons spinning around in various orbits like the planetary system.
Electrons, protons and neutrons are smaller marbles which are also real because
they can be imagined. If there are smaller particles out of which these are
constituted then those quarks or whatever you want to call them are still
smaller marbles. If when you point out that nobody has ever seen an atom, people
operating out of this criterion of the real are not put out. They say that this
is what atoms will look like when we do see one! If you insist that atoms are
explanatory concepts, they will accuse you of idealism and still insist that
atoms are real and hence imaginable.
The problem with this whole line of thinking is that the atom is a unit of
explanatory knowledge. It is defined in terms of relations of things to one
another; it is one of the terms defined by the relations of an explanatory
system. There is no verifiable image. There is no 'out there now real'. There is
no foothold for the imagination. For pedagogical reasons we construct a model
which embodies and symbolizes the relations of things to one another, but the
reality is in the equations and not in the model. When the scientist, having
verified his equations and laws, tries to tell us what the sub-atomic world
really looks like, he is foisting on us unverifiable images. He does it because
he cannot distinguish the real as the out there now and the real as what is
verified in instances. Such confusion is a perennial source of nonsense.
6. Reductionism. A crucial case is the question of things within things.8
The scientists tell us that there are about one hundred basic elements out of
which everything else is made. Atoms combine to form the compounds that are
studied in chemistry; they combine in even more complicated ways to produce
living cells which are studied in biology. Cells develop and evolve and form
more complicated systems so that eventually we have plant life. Again [291]
plants evolve and develop and become more complicated and integrated systems.
Then behold, we have animals. The question of things within things is the
question, is water nothing more then hydrogen and oxygen? Does hydrogen and
oxygen continue to exist as hydrogen and oxygen in water? Is an animal nothing
more than the sum of its cells? Do the cells have an existence, meaning,
identity, apart from the larger whole? Are atoms things within molecules? Are
cells things within organisms?
What is an animal made out of? The biologist will probably reply that it is
made out of water, carbon, sulfur, and nitrogen in such and such percentages; if
you reduce an animal to its parts these are the parts out of which it is made.
This response is explicitly reductionist. An animal is what it is made out of
and nothing more. It is made out of chemical elements and compounds and this is
what makes an animal. In this kind of thinking an animal is simply a very
complicated machine, no more than the sum of its parts. For such scientists
there is no problem of things within things: the atoms survive as atoms in the
wholeness of the animal. An animal is simply the sum of its parts and the parts
ultimately are atoms and compounds and cells. Cells are nothing more than a
complicated system of compounds, and compounds as everybody knows are just
combinations of elements. If you think of atoms as imaginable entities flying
around in space then you will inevitably arrive at this position. This is
thinking in terms of 'bodies'.
We have given quite a different account of knowing a thing. A thing is a
unity, identity, whole that we grasp by understanding and judging data in its
concrete individuality. In descriptive knowing there is a verifiable image; in
explanatory knowing there is implicit definition of terms and relations and no
verifiable images. The elements that form the basis of the periodic table are
terms defined by their relations to one another in an explanatory construct
based on atomic weight. Symbols and images for these elements are constructed
for pedagogical reasons, not seen. What about chemical compounds? Are they
simply the sum of the parts or are they more than the sum of the parts?
Aristotle faced this problem with the syllable.9
Is the syllable C A T simply the sum of the three individual letters or does it
have [292] something more? He answered that it has something more but that
'more' is not a material entity but precisely the unity of the three letters,
which he called a form. We would agree with him. Reality is known not by the
senses alone but by insight into verifiable intelligibilities. Chemical
compounds are different from mixtures. They have a unity, an identity, a
permanence that the chemist studies and explains; they become the terms defined
by the explanatory relations of chemistry. The compounds of chemistry have
something more than the parts out of which they are made; this more is not
another material element but an intelligibility, a unity, an identity, a
permanence which is grasped not by sense but by insight and judgment.
To our way of thinking, there is a problem of things within things. We cannot
simply say that compounds are the sum of the elements out of which they are
made; we cannot say that cells are simply the sum of the chemical compounds and
reactions out of which they are made. We cannot say that an animal can be fully
explained by enumerating the various parts out of which it is made; an animal is
not simply a complicated machine. There are different kinds of unities and
identities pertaining to different levels of the real. These are not grasped by
imagination but by explanatory insights and judgments. Aristotle distinguished
between the material cause (what is a thing made out of?) and the formal cause
(what is it?). Those who think in terms of 'body' and 'out there now real' tend
to think in terms of material cause as if it were the complete explanation.
People who think in terms of knowing as understanding and judging realize that
knowing what a thing is made of is useful and helpful; but that there is a
further question as to what is a thing. The further question cannot be answered
in terms of its parts, but must be answered in terms of its form, its formal
cause, what we refer to as the intelligibility, the unity, the identity of the
thing.
7. Conclusion. Our theme is intellectual conversion. We are defining a
transition from elementary knowing to the knowing constituted by experiencing,
understanding and judging. The point of the above is to give an example of this
transition. It is of crucial importance. Confusion over the criterion of knowing
has pervaded philosophy since the beginning and still pervades and underlies
[293] every philosophic discussion. In most cases it is simply taken for granted
that what is real is what is 'already out there now'. This is the unquestioned
assumption of all forms of empiricism but is also implicit in many other brands
of idealism and realism. Our point is not to teach about the history of
philosophy or science but to invite the reader to recognize the dialectic of
these two criteria of the real in his own consciousness. To be able to
differentiate between these two realms, that of elementary knowing and of the
knowing of judgment, is one way of defining intellectual conversion.
3. Naive Realism to Critical Realism
We continue to focus on intellectual conversion but we now approach this in
terms of what a philosophy considers to be real. We will take a few sample
philosophers to try to penetrate their unspoken assumptions about what is real
and then outline the critical realist position, which is another way of defining
intellectual conversion. At the heart of every philosophy there is the question
of what the philosophy considers as real. Some philosophies do give an explicit
answer to this question in others the answer is implicit in the criteria they
use. Sometimes it is very difficult for a philosophy to face up to this
fundamental question and its answer may not be always clear. It is such a
fundamental question that the position on the real sets the agenda for the rest
of the philosophy
1. Naive Realism. The naive realist is blissfully unaware that there are
two criteria of the real, hence he is unable to recognize or distinguish between
them. Consequently he operates sometimes on the basis of imagination, sometimes
on the basis of verification, in a haphazard and indiscriminate manner. The
person of common sense embodies a confused mingling of the realism of the 'out
there now' real and the criterion of judgment. Both elementary knowing and
critical knowing are operative but in a confused undifferentiated mess. No great
harm ensues as long as the person does not try to become a philosopher or a
scientist or a philosopher of science. But if he does become a theoretician he
will carry the criteria and the mentality of elementary knowing with him into
the field of theory and explanation and system. The predominant image in the
naive realist is that of the real as out there; if this is assumed into a [293]
philosophy or science then nothing but confusion and nonsense can follow.
2. Plato. We cannot pretend here to do justice to the wealth of Plato=s
thought on knowledge and his related metaphysics. There have been so many
critical studies of Plato's thought that one is almost afraid to say that he
held any particular position. Our sketch intends only to illustrate his way of
thinking and some of the apparent presuppositions behind that way of thinking.
Our route into the mind of Plato is the expressions of the characters in his
dialogues. We center on the question of what is real; not on the answers so much
as on how Plato went looking for an answer. We can only assemble some fragments
hoping that it will be sufficient to make our point.
The problem of negative or false statements was an area of great difficulty
for Plato.10 His difficulty stemmed
from his expectation that for every concept or statement in the mind there was
something outside the mind corresponding to it. But what exists outside the mind
corresponding to negative or false statements? It suggests the ultimate
absurdity that there is a non-being that corresponds to these falsehoods,
namely, that non-being is. This Plato was not willing to accept so he had to
leave the question unresolved. It did not strike him that he might question his
unspoken assumption that knowing was a perfect correspondence between in here
and out there.
In the Sophist Plato explicitly faces the issue as to reality and
unreality.11 He begins with a
consideration of the history of the question. Some have said there are three
real beings, some have said two, and the Eleatic set say there is only one real
thing. All of these fall to the same argument. If we take the Eleatics as an
example; they say that the real is only one. But the one is not the same as the
real, and the real is not the same as the one; and so there are at least two
things, the one and the real! Reading the passage and the rather labored
arguments it seems to be that Plato=s
real difficulty lay in the expectation that corresponding to every concept in
the mind like real, one, being, hot, cold, there must be a corresponding
something outside the mind in a sort of one to one correlation with the concept.
Another of Plato's assumptions seems to have been that real knowledge must be
'infallible and of what is'.12 When
he then comes [295] to distinguishing between different kinds of knowledge he
divides it into sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge. Only the latter
constitutes true knowledge because it is knowledge of 'what is' and what does
not change. The trouble with knowledge of sense is that its object is constantly
changing. How can you have permanent knowledge of what is always changing? Hence
in the metaphor of the divided line and of the cave he teaches that sense
knowledge cannot be of 'what is' because the world is constantly changing.
Intellectual knowledge can be of 'what is' because of the existence of the
subsistent Forms.
The implication of this theory of knowledge is that outside the mind
corresponding to sense knowledge you have the material, visible, changing world;
corresponding and as it were validating intellectual knowledge you have the
changeless, perfect subsistent Forms. The dominant unspoken assumption of all of
this discussion is the attempt to correlate what goes on in the mind to the
corresponding realities outside the mind. But does this image of correspondence
derive from imagination or understanding?
3. The reality of Universals. This dispute dominated the early Middle
Ages but has a long history in medieval and contemporary times. Universals
include concepts such as man or dog, laws of physics or chemistry such as the
law of gravity, virtues such as justice or courage, or accidental forms such as
qualities or quantities. The problem arose as to in what sense are they real.
Our interest is not so much in the universals but in what was intended by the
word real. This examination should help us to see the different meanings of real
assumed by various philosophies. For the same of convenience and simplicity we
will divide them into three groups.
Firstly, the Nominalists and Positivists deny that there are any natures or
essences or universals at all; there are only individual, concrete, particular
things. They deny any reality to universals or natures outside the mind. They
will admit that we formulate categories of things in our minds, like trees, and
atoms, and dogs, but that is only for convenience; the only thing they have in
common is the same name, hence, nominalism. There is nothing outside the mind in
dogs or atoms or trees corresponding to this linguistic classification. [296]
Secondly, there are the Ultra-Realists, who hold that universals are real,
not only in the mind but also outside the mind, as universals. The standard
interpretation of Plato would exemplify this position: the Forms or Universals
exist apart, perfect, subsistent, unchanging, eternal. Particular things, trees,
beautiful art, virtuous people participate in or imitate these Universals and
draw their reality from them.
Thirdly, the moderate realists hold that the universal exists as a universal
in the knowing subject but that it exists individualized in the particular,
outside the mind. This would be the position of Aristotle, Aquinas and
mainstream scholasticism. In contrast to Plato, who held that Forms were
transcendent, Aristotle held that they were immanent. For Aristotle forms are
received materially in the concrete particular; they are received immaterially
in the mind; but it is the same form or universal.
The reality of universals is still a contentious issue today particularly in
the philosophy of science. Our approach of self-appropriation invites us to ask
the following questions: Where do universals come from? What function do they
perform? Are they real?
Universals come from the process of generalizing and the correct expression
of that generalization in a concept or definition. >Humanity=
is a philosophical generalization expressing the idea that all human beings have
something in common, belong to the came category, and are somehow the same. We
can further define what we have in common as rational animal or symbol-making
animal; you can further specify or explain these terms. It is the act of basic
human understanding that produces the universal and without that process of
generalizing, of grasping a universal, there is no intellectual knowing. The
senses know particulars as particulars; intelligence can only know the universal
in the particular, namely, the particular as belonging to a category or class or
universal. Earlier we outlined the heuristic process by which the human mind
produces ideas from images.
Universals function in that they enable us to know individuals as members of
a class. The universal is a means by which we distinguish chalk from cheese,
humans from non-humans, living [297] from non-living. First we understand the
differences between these categories; then we express the reasons why they are
different; by a reflex action we can attend to the universal as an object and
define it. Primarily, universals function in our science of objects as that by
which we classify, distinguish and relate. Secondarily, we reflect on the
categories, define clearly the criteria for belonging to that category and
formulate the definition clearly.
Are universals real? The Nominalists claim that there is no reality to
universals outside the mind; there are only individuals. But we know individuals
as individuals by way of the senses; our experience of the process of
intellectual knowing indicates that we know things as particular examples of
universals, we generalize, we put them into categories; it seems there is some
reality to universals apart from our thinking or talking of them.
Few follow the line of Plato today asserting the reality of universals as
universals. Individual trees we encounter; trees in general we do not.
Individual horses we see; but horseness itself we do not see. Things can be
numbered but number itself we do not encounter.
The experience that we have outlined of the process of going from the
particular to the general and vice versa seems to indicate both that there are
individuals and that they do belong to genus and species. They can be grouped
together and this grouping is not artificial and extrinsic but how things are.
Awareness of the activity of understanding seems to indicate the kind of
understanding appropriate to this world of ours. We do not encounter natures or
essences apart from particulars. It is one aspect of organizing intelligence to
categorize individuals in classes. This does not seem to be an artificial or
arbitrary procedure and seems to be capable of verification. Our experience
would seem to indicate that as understanding pivots from the particular to the
general, so also the individual is one of a species or genus. We will answer the
question of the reality of universals when we state the criterion of critical
realism.
4. Descartes. Proceeding from his methodic doubt, to the cogito,
to the existence of God, to the reliability of our knowledge, Descartes then
faces the question of what he considers to be real. He [298] divides the real
into two, Matter and Spirit. Matter is identical with extension and therefore
there can be no vacuum, no void, no space with nothing in it. Here, metaphysics
is determining science: his exclusion of a void is not based on observation but
on a deduction from metaphysics. Spirit is thought and does not occupy space. It
seems that this distinction between Matter and Spirit is based on imagination
rather then judgment as we see from two examples, of qualities, and the
mind/body relation.
Matter is extension. Extension is one of the primary qualities that belong to
matter; these primary qualities are real. Secondary qualities like color and
taste and smell are not real; they are not in the matter as qualities but they
are in the matter as powers to create these sensations in us. Secondary
qualities do not exist outside the mind as qualities but as powers, virtually
present in that somehow they cause these reactions in our senses. We can catch a
glimpse of the unquestioned assumption that to be real is to be 'out there'
while to be unreal is to be out there not in essence but only as a power. But
does the model of in here and out there provide the criterion of the truth?
If there are two real things, Matter and Spirit, how are they related,
particularly in the case of the human person who is both body and mind?
Descartes seems to have thought of Spirit as invisible, intangible, outside time
and space, but still real meaning, a 'stuff', a ghost, an imaginable, ethereal
entity. If matter is coterminous with extension, it is hard to see how it can be
affected by Spirit. How can mind, which is spiritual, affect body, which is
material, when they belong to such distinct realms? Descartes solved this for
himself by postulating one point of contact in the pineal gland. This may have
satisfied his imagination, but his successors were more critical and had to
invent more complicated theories of occasionalism and parallelism to account for
contact between mind and body.13
Descartes started modern philosophy off on a false dichotomy between Spirit and
Matter, soul and body, ghost in a machine, from which it has not yet recovered.
Try to recognize the influence of imagination in the definition of spirit and
the question of interaction between matter and spirit. [299]
5. Immanuel Kant. Although Kant attempts to break into a new critical
philosophy and leave behind the rationalistic scholasticism of Leibniz and
Wolff, his thinking continues to depend on some of the basic assumptions of
these philosophies. One of these was the assumption of inner and outer, knowing
being inner, and the known being outer.
According to Kant, "There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins
with experience."14 "The capacity
(receptivity) for receiving representations through the mode in which we are
affected by objects, is entitled sensibility."15
Phenomena can be known because we have an intuition of them; even though
sensibility needs the pure forms of space and time, it is clear that at the
level of sensibility we have a knowledge of what is really out there by way of
the senses. By sensible intuitions we have direct contact between the mind and
phenomena.
But at the level of understanding there is a problem for Kant; if all our
knowledge comes through the senses, how can the senses know causality,
substantiality, unity, etc.? "But all thought must, directly or indirectly,
by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore,
with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to
us."16 The only channel between
the knower and the known, the inner and the outer, is the senses which by
definition can only receive representations. Therefore, we have no way of
contacting substance or cause to know if it is really out there. In Kant's
terminology, we have no way of knowing the thing-in-itself, the noumenon.
If the reality of substance, cause, etc. cannot be grounded in the out there
now real, then Kant's Copernican revolution proposes, let us ground it in the
mind itself. We need these categories if there is to be any understanding, so
let us propose that these concepts are a priori concepts of the Understanding.
Hence he elaborates his twelve categories, among them the category of Inherence
and Subsistence. He uses both the notion of permanence and the notion of
substratum in proving this inner reality of substance: "In all changes of
appearances, substance is permanent; its quantum in nature is neither increased
nor decreased."17 "But the
substratum of all that is real, that is, of all that belongs to the existence of
things, is [300] substance; and all that belongs to existence can be thought
only as a determination of substance."18
This thinking led Kant to the impossibility of pure reason knowing the
thing-in-itself, the noumenon; nevertheless he supposed that the noumenon lies
out there now behind the appearances. His theory of knowledge denied him the
possibility of knowing a noumenon but his imagination demanded that we presume a
noumenon. Thus he was left with the strange alternative of grounding knowledge
in the a priori categories and still supposing that there is a noumenon out
there corresponding to these concepts.
6. Critical Realism. The phrase 'critical realism' is sometimes
associated with Kant's approach to thinking in terms of the a priori conditions
for the possibility of knowing. For Kant the principal task of philosophy it to
establish these a priori conditions for the possibility of knowing. There is,
however, a certain contradiction involved in establishing the preconditions of
knowing when at the same time you are already knowing. Can you look at the mind
and at reality from the outside as it were to establish what it can know and
what it cannot know? Our strategy has been quite different. We have been
examining many concrete examples of successful and correct knowing and examining
the mental activities involved in this process. We have been appealing not to
any Authority but to successful knowing in each person. We have been appealing
to our own experience of the different criteria of the real, and the
implications of this for philosophy. We have been discovering for ourselves the
actual limits of our knowing, from the inside, not from the outside.
For us, then, critical realism is a realism in which "the real is the
verified. It is what is known by the knowing constituted by experience and
inquiry, insight and hypothesis, reflection and verification."19
It is a break with the criterion of the out there now real; it leaves behind
predominant influence that imagination imposes on us in terms of in here and out
there. It distinguishes elementary knowing and critical knowing. It recognizes
the need for explanation and theory and yet accepts that at the level of
explanation there are no verifiable representative images. Our [301] knowing is
coterminous with verification and verification occurs in judgment. Our knowing
is nothing more or less than that.
Are universals real? Very often the question was posed in the context the
animal criterion of the real, in other words, are universals 'bodies', are they
out there now real. Put in the context of our criterion of the verified, the
question becomes can universals be verified. Can you verify that Africans and
Europeans belong to the same human race? Can you verify the law of gravity? Can
you verify that this is green and that is red? Humanity is real, not in the
sense of being apart from individuals, but in the sense that all human beings
are really fully human beings. The law of gravity is real not in being apart
from matter, but in being intelligibility of matter. To ask where are the laws
of physics, or where are the universals is to regress to imaginative
presuppositions that to be real they must be in place.
Plato, Descartes and Kant in their own different ways were dominated by the
imaginative assumption that knowing is a matter of crossing the bridge from
thinking in here to reality out there. Intellectual conversion can be understood
as abandoning that imaginative schema altogether. It is correct judgments that
define what is real. It is not a question of imagination but of judgments. The
question of subject and object will be faced, but it will be done in terms of
judgments and not in terms of unquestioned imaginative expectations.
4. From 'Looking' to Knowing
1. Insight/Intuition. Another way of talking about the transition
involved in intellectual conversion is to grasp the difference between knowing
modeled on ocular vision and the knowing of cognitional structure. Seeing is the
predominant sense and offers itself as a ready and dominant paradigm when it
comes to intellectual knowing. Many philosophers have fallen into this
temptation and talk about knowing as an intuition; for them knowing is conceived
on the model of looking. Just as looking is one simple operation of direct
sensation, for these philosophers intellectual knowing is simple direct
intellectual perception. Just as the sense of seeing is predominantly passive,
i.e., we open our eyes and we see [302] what is there to be seen; so also
intellectual knowing is passive, i.e., we see with our intellectual vision what
is already there to be seen. Just as seeing is immediate - there is no obstacle
or intermediary involved in the direct vision of objects - so intuition is a
direct vision of essences, causes, being or universals.
In this section we will consider a few philosophers who have elaborated a
theory of knowledge based on this assumption that intellectual knowing must be
something like seeing. We use the word 'intuition' to describe that sort of
knowing which is modeled on 'looking'; Webster defines intuition as "the
power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge without evident rational
thought and inference."20
Intuition is quite different from insight. Insight we have already explained at
length; it is understanding of relations perceived in data under the influence
of questioning; it can be direct or reflective; knowing is not just insights but
experiencing, understanding, and judging; the only distinction we have between
sense knowing and intellectual knowing is that between elementary knowing, which
is animal knowing, and the human knowing constituted by experiencing,
understanding and judging. To avoid possible confusion in the English language
between insight and intuition and we have explained the difference. In French
there is only the one word l'intuition for the two meanings
differentiated above. Yet it is clear that the two French authors that we will
be considering are using l=intuition
not in the sense of 'insight' but in the sense of 'intuition'.
2. John Duns Scotus. Aquinas held quite explicitly that the primary and
proper object of the human intellect is the essence of the concrete individual.
Hence for Aquinas knowing is always through phantasms by a process of
abstraction, i.e. understanding. For Scotus however the primary and proper
object of intellect is being as being, the universal as such. Here Scotus had to
distinguish two kinds of knowing, intuitive knowing and abstractive knowing.
Because being as being does not exist as such separate from individual beings,
how do we come to know something as a being? By abstractive knowledge we know
something as a universal, by intuitive knowing we know something as actually a
being and actually existent. "Intuitive knowledge is knowledge of an object
as [303] present in its actual existence and it is against the nature of
intuitive knowledge that it should be knowledge of an object which is not
actually existent and present."21
For Aquinas the proper object of human intellect is the essence of the
concrete thing; primarily we know the essence, secondarily by a kind of turning
around we can know the individual; but we can never have intellectual knowing of
the individual as an individual. For Scotus we have a direct intuitive clear
knowledge of the individual. For Scotus there is an intuition that accompanies
every act of human knowing, whether it is the intuition of being or the
intuition of the concrete individual. One has reason to suspect that what he
means by intuition is having a good direct look at something.
3. Henri Bergson.22 Bergson
was not particularly happy with the philosophical system builders of his time.
Philosophy had become too abstract and systematic and too far removed from
concrete concerns or the life of the spirit. Philosophers were trying to
understand all possible and even impossible worlds. His was an attempt to bring
philosophy back into the stream of life.
For Bergson there are two ways of knowing, the analytic and the intuitive.
The analytic is the method of science and of the philosophical system builders.
Intuition on the other hand is immediate consciousness of an object. The object
of intuition is reality. Science deals with matter using the method of analysis.
Philosophy deals with spirit and its method is intuitive. It is only in
intuition that the mind can have direct awareness of the actual movement of
life.
The primary object of such intuition is movement, becoming, duration. For
Bergson this is reality. There are changes, but there are not, under the change,
things which change; change has no need of a support. This is a point of
fundamental importance in his philosophy. It is a philosophy of change or of
evolution or of life. Analysis kills what is being analyzed; only intuition
enables us to grasp a living changing reality. Bergson accuses traditional
philosophers of abstracting a lifeless system of concepts from reality and
losing touch with the vitality of reality. The philosopher should take as his
point of departure an intuitive or immediate awareness of [304] the inner life
of the spirit as it is lived, then prolong this intuition in reflection.
It is clear that Bergson is reacting against a conceptualist kind of
philosophy which we also reject. But while it would be nice to think that we
have direct intuitions of movement, life and duration, all this boils down to a
matter of fact. We have constantly appealed to the data of consciousness to
identify the characteristics of insight and have found no evidence for Bergson's
immediate intuition of the elan vital.
4. Jacques Maritain. Jacques Maritain gave a series of lectures in Paris
in which he attempted to popularize his renewed Thomism. These were published in
Preface to Metaphysics.23 Even
allowing for the fact that it was a popular lecture series we get a clear idea
of the role of intuition from these extracts from Lecture three:
For the intuition of being is also the intuition of its transcendental
character and analogical value. It is not enough to employ the word being,
to say 'being'. We must have the intuition, the intellectual perception of
the inexhaustible and incomprehensible reality thus manifested as the object
of this perception. It is this intuition that makes the metaphysician.....
We are confronted here with a genuine intuition, a perception direct and
immediate, an intuition not in the technical sense which the ancients
attached to the term, but in the sense we may accept from modern philosophy.
It is a very simple sight, superior to any discursive reasoning or
demonstration, because it is the source of demonstration. It is a sight
whose content and implications no words of human speech can exhaust or
adequately express and in which in a moment of decisive emotion, as it were,
of spiritual conflagration the soul is in contact, a living, penetrating,
and illuminating contact, with a reality which it touches and which takes
hold of it....
Even allowing for the rather poetic language, we can see the importance of
intuition in Maritain's philosophy. You cannot be a metaphysician without it.
Even Kant, he goes on to explain, did not have this intuition, this gift, this
revelation which he calls an intellectual perception, a sight. It is an
intellectual vision, a looking directly at being. It is direct and immediate
with no complicated abstractions of universals from images or insights into the
sufficiency of the evidence. It is a confrontation model of knowing where the
known is over against the knower. We get in contact with this reality, we touch
it by way of this direct intuition. [305]
Perhaps Maritain is describing a mystical experience proper more to religion
than to philosophy. But as philosophers do we have these intuitions? Is this how
we know universals? Is this how we know being? The simplest test is the question
of fact. Is this a correct objectification of the process of knowing? Is this
what actually happens in our minds when we understand something or judge
something to be true? Do we have experiences of direct intellectual visions of
an 'inexhaustible and incomprehensible reality'?
5. Correspondence/Confrontation/Identity. If you envisage knowing on the
model of looking you will tend towards a confrontational model of knowing.
Looking readily suggests a looking subject and a looked at object in immediate
contact by way of ocular vision; the object is quite separate from, opposed to,
in confrontation over against the subject. This model of knowing will suggest
that the intellect has direct immediate contact with its intelligible object in
a kind of intuition but the object is quite distinct from and in confrontation
with the subject. This in turn will probably lead to an imaginative version of
the correspondence theory of truth: truth lies in correspondence between what is
in the mind (looking) and what is outside the mind (the looked at).
Aristotle proposed a quite different theory of knowing, not by confrontation
but by identity. Even at the level of sense knowing the confrontation model
limps - for Aristotle the sensible in act is identical with the sense in act.
For sensation to occur there must be some kind of assimilation, identity, rather
then simple confrontation. If a tree falls in a forest with nobody within
earshot does it make a sound? I think Aristotle would answer that there is
potential sound but no actual sound; to have sound you have to have a hearing;
there are vibrations in the air (potential sound) but no hearing and so no
actual sound. Even at the level of sensation there must be some kind of
assimilation or identity between the sensing and the sensed. Sensation is
passive reception of sense impressions assimilated according to the mode of the
receiving sense.
More so at the level of human intellectual knowing, Aristotle insists on the
model of identity rather than that of confrontation: the intelligible in act is
identical with the intellect in act; the form received materially in the
concrete thing is received immaterially in [306] the intellect but it is the
same intelligibility or form; intellect is in potency to become all things. When
we know a stone we possess the intelligibility of the stone; the intelligibility
of a particular stone is received immaterially in the intellect as an idea. For
intellectual knowing to occur there must be some kind of assimilation or
identity between the knowing and the known.24
Can we transpose this discussion into a terminology with which we are now
familiar from examining the experience of insight and judgment? My experience of
cognitional process is that it is a complicated procedure combining many
activities at different levels into one structure of knowing. It is not simple
in the sense of one act with one object, but is instead a series of acts which
are components of one whole. It is passive in the sense that the data is given
in the senses; but intellect is active in questioning, in searching for theories
that explain the data, and in sorting out which theories can be verified and
which are to be rejected because they cannot be verified. Knowledge is not
immediate, intuitive or simple but is mediated by the senses, the images, the
questions, the hypotheses that contribute to a true judgment.
At the level of understanding we can agree with Aristotle that we grasp the
intelligibility in an immaterial reception. Our definition of water grasped as a
universal concept in the mind is identical with the intelligibility of the
individual concrete instance of water. But there does also have to be a
differentiation by which we distinguish the universal from the particular, the
intelligible from the sensible, the subject from the object but this happens in
the judgment. 'This is water', asserts that this sensible data is an instance of
the definition of water.
We could espouse a correspondence theory of truth in the sense that there
must be a correspondence, not in terms of in here and out there, but between our
judgments and what is. How do we know if a judgment is true? It is true if the
evidence is sufficient; if other alternatives have been excluded; if there is a
proportion between the evidence and the conclusion; if the judgment corresponds
with what is. You know your judgment is true if you are sure of your grounds, no
further pertinent questions arise, you are sure that your motives are honest and
your methods above board, your inquiry has been [307] exhaustive, there is
nothing further to be gained by delaying, you move on to other matters. It is
inquiring intelligence which explores every possibility, which ensures that
other alternatives are excluded, that there are sufficient grounds for this
judgment; and posits the judgment. A wrong judgment will soon be shown not to be
in correspondence with the facts, the evidence, the data. If you do not uncover
this for yourself, someone else will surely have the pleasure of pointing out
your inconsistency.
In conclusion, we do not appeal to the authority of the Aristotle but the
witness of cognitional facts. What are the facts of your own experience of
understanding and judging? It seems to me that knowing is a complicated series
of activities, both sensitive and intellectual, both active and passive,
involving elements of identity and elements of differentiation. One single
imaginative model cannot do justice to the complexity of human knowing. To think
of knowing as looking is most tempting but ultimately fails. Intellectual
conversion is accepting the witness of what actually happens when we know and
abandoning the oversimple image of knowing as looking. Knowing may begin in
seeing, but includes also understanding and judging.
5. From Immediacy to the World Mediated by Meaning
Another approach to intellectual conversion is to trace the evolution from
one way of thinking about reality to another as it emerges in the infant, the
child, and the adult. What follows is just a sketch of the relevant aspects of
intellectual development. More detailed and complete analysis of intellectual
development could be found in Piaget or any of the other cognitional
psychologists. Unfortunately, none of them focus on the precise development of
insight and reflection in which we are interested.
The infant starts in the world of immediacy.25
What is real is the sum total of what is seen, heard, touched, tasted, smelled
and felt. The infant is a bundle of sensations, emotions and experiences. What
is real is what can be grasped physically, what can be felt by the hands and
usually put in the mouth. The infant has difficulty at [308] first developing a
sense of identity or, even identifying the parts of his own body, but soon
develops a sense of what is inside and what is outside. The infant lives in the
present, is dominated by its needs and the satisfaction of those needs, and is
thoroughly egocentric. There is little to distinguish the development of the
infant from that of the animal. An infant's sensorimotor development is very
slow compared to other animals and the period of dependence on the parent is
longer than for other animals. This is the world of immediacy, the world of what
is immediately present to the senses. The criterion of what is real in this
world is what the senses can see, grasp and put in the mouth.
But the infant slowly and exultantly moves into a world mediated by meaning.
Perhaps the first clear expression of intelligence is by way of naming; the
parents are named and hence identified, recognized, distinguished from other
objects and persons. Other basic objects and needs are named as the process of
moving into the world of meaning advances. All sorts of other developments take
place. In identifying shapes, distinguishing noises and colors, and knowing the
cause and the meaning, associations are built up and general categories and
conclusions reached. The world of immediacy is giving way to the expanded world
mediated by meaning.
Eventually the child's world is not simply the present but also a past that
is remembered, promises that were made and have to be fulfilled, a rule that was
laid down which must be kept, a routine that has to be fulfilled. There is the
future, the possibility of postponing gratification, plans laid down for future
activities, looking forward to future events. The world is not only what is
physically present but what is absent for the moment; places can be named and
visited. People who are absent are still part of the child's consciousness and
concern. What is learned by understanding is passing into the habitual texture
of the mind.
Beliefs about God, fairies, monsters, Santa Claus, mingle in a confused
bundle of fiction, fantasy and fact. Each culture will feed the child with its
own language, its own stories, its own way of behaving, its customs, clothes,
music, prayer and duties. Being so dependent on adults the child accepts most of
what it is told on the [309] authority of the parents. The child will move into
that world of values, beliefs, causes, and mores which is usually a mixture of
fact and fantasy. Stories about Jesus from the Bible are followed by Santa
Claus, Cinderella, the man in the Moon, etc., according to the different
cultures.
The child is usually very anxious to know about these things and incessantly
asks, "Why?" But some answers do not satisfy; a period of silence
might ensue while the child digests the answer and then replies,
"but..." raising an objection to the proposed answer. It is reason
that is immanent and operative, now beginning to distinguish between what makes
sense and what does not make sense, that for which there is evidence and that
which contradicts the evidence. At a certain point the story of Santa Claus no
longer stands up to criticism, the evidence is against it, suspicions are
aroused, a test is made, the presents are found hidden in a closet, a myth has
been exploded, the child is moving into the hard reality of fact.
A new criterion of meaning and truth is becoming operative: it is
verification, in a basic rudimentary way. This is the world of meanings
conferred on objects, values that guide behavior, truths about how things work,
mathematics that determine what you can buy with so much money, how things are
to be shared, how things are made. Natural properties are recognized: gravity in
sliding down an incline, fire that burns, water in which you can float and swim,
paper airplanes that fly through the air. This is the world of meaning,
constructed by insights and generalizations, and gradually being checked against
the available evidence.
This world mediated by meaning will expand enormously through education; it
can move in many different directions depending on the culture, the educational
possibilities available, and the choices of the person. He can move into the
world of nuclear physics, the world of scriptural exegesis, the world of
historical scholarship, computer programming, literary studies, theology or
mysticism. These are worlds not given in the direct data of sense but mediated
by insights and judgments and embodied in technology and systems of theories.
Again we can see that two different criteria of what is real are operative.
For the infant in the world of immediacy, it is the senses [310] that prove what
is real by touching, seeing and tasting. But in the world mediated by meaning it
is the more intangible criterion of verification, sufficient evidence, the
correctness of a judgment, that is the criterion of the real. The criterion of
verification emerges spontaneously in the context of the prior criterion of
sense. The two criteria coexist in a state of tension and perhaps confusion.
Most people of common sense never realize that these two criteria are there. It
is when you move into theory that you need to distinguish explicitly between
these two criteria.
The difficulty arises when a scientist tries to tell us what scientific
reality really looks like. It arises when a philosopher gives us a theory of
reality without having distinguished the two criteria of the real. The
difficulty arises by the persistence of the earlier criterion of the real when
what should be evoked is the mature criterion of verification and judgment. But
judgment is a very impalpable criterion and we often revert to the basic
instinct that what is real is what can be sensed, seen and touched. This is the
bane of every philosophy, the underlying and basic dualism unfolding throughout
the history of philosophy, yet it is seldom adverted to, seldom recognized,
seldom overcome.
Hopefully, we have identified in our own consciousness the operation of these
two criteria of the real; our objectification of the process of knowing should
have laid bare this basic dualism. It is a constant struggle to apply the
principle of sufficient evidence and to deny the expectations of imaginative
representation. This again is the theme of intellectual conversion.
6. Clarifications on Intellectual Conversion
From one point of view intellectual conversion can be said to be simple, from
another to be very difficult. It is simple in the sense that we spontaneously
substitute the criterion of verification for the criterion of animal sensing as
we move from the world of the child to the world mediated by meaning. The child
rejecting the story of Santa Claus is operating on the principle of sufficient
reason. The world mediated by meaning is not confined to philosophers or [311]
intellectuals; it includes anyone who operates on the criterion of verified
meaning.
The difficulty is in objectifying this process, distinguishing the two worlds
and implementing this distinction consistently and universally. It can be very
difficult, as we have seen, to identify this dualism in our knowing; it is also
very difficult to talk about it as it, as this presupposes some sophisticated
awareness of mental processes. Most philosophers and scientists have failed to
disentangle this dualism and are in fact unaware of the dialectic between the
two ways of knowing. This has led to endless confusion as to what is real, what
is objective and what scientific reality really looks like.
Intellectual conversion is not just awareness of the distinction between
elementary knowing and cognitional structure but it is the application of the
distinction in science and philosophy. It would be of great benefit to
scientists to do a basic course in critical realism before they pronounce on
reality, truth and objectivity. Not having done technical philosophy the
scientist uses the unquestioned assumptions of naive realism as the basis for
his pronouncements on what is real and what is objective.
Intellectual conversion is particularly important for philosophers and
theologians. It is not just a question of subscribing to a new list of
propositions to replace the propositions or the fashions of old. It is not just
a new philosophy to be learned, and taught. It is more like a conversion
experience, a revolution in thought and method which challenges us to implement
a new way of doing philosophy and science
7. Performance and Content
The pillar of our approach to the theory of knowledge has been
self-appropriation. The foundation of self-appropriation has been to start with
the actual activities of human knowing - to describe them, define them, relate
them together, formulate an explanatory account where at each stage and for each
term there will be a validating reference to the data of consciousness. The key,
then, to our approach has been coherence between the activities and the theory:
[312] the activities verify the theory; the theory explains, relates,
objectivizes the activities.
There is only one human knowing; there is only one basic set of interrelated
activities which produce true human knowing. It is the same human knowing
whether it is Aristotle or Sartre, Ireland or America, Africa or Japan. If there
is only one set of basically unrevisable activities there is also only one
explanatory theory which adequately relates, defines and objectivizes these
activities. Hence there can be only one theory of knowledge which is coherent
with the actual activities involved in human knowing. We claim that that is our
theory and that it is basically unrevisable. We are not talking here about
differences in terminology or detail but the fundamental stance on the structure
of knowing.
It follows, as night follows day, that in all other theories of knowledge
which differ fundamentally from the above, there will be an incoherence between
what the philosopher is actually doing and what he is actually saying: there
will be a fundamental incoherence between performance and content. The
activities of knowing as performed are a constant. These are the activities of
attending to data, (doing research, making observations, performing
experiments); of being intelligent, (grasping the relevant and leaving aside the
irrelevant, defining terms clearly, thinking things through to the end, moving
from images to ideas, from ideas to concepts and theories); and finally being reasonable, checking
results, evaluating, asserting, denying, proposing as true, publishing and
proclaiming). These are the activities performed by Descartes as he sat down to
write his Meditations, or to instruct the Queen of Sweden on his new
philosophy. These are the activities performed by Hume as he worked on his Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding: he was not satisfied with what Locke
had written; he thought he could do better; he wanted to show that his
understanding was indeed better, clearer, truer, more to the point, more
radical. These are the activities performed by Kant in his study at Konigsberg
and his daily walks through the town; thinking, reflecting, creating, accepting,
rejecting, etc.
The human mind is the same; the activities performed are the same; but oh!
what different theories they came up with! The [313] content of the theories was
so different from the activities of human knowing that produced the theories.
Descartes taught that clear and distinct ideas were the criterion of truth;
but if he attended to his own knowing he would have found many clear and
distinct ideas which were not true; and many confused and vague ideas which are
true. He taught a distinction between Matter and Thought; but was this based on
imagination or on intelligence, the out there now real or the verified? He
taught that science could be deduced from principles of philosophy; but does
that the way scientist actually work?
Hume taught that all mental activities could be reduced to sensation. Was
what he was doing in writing his book at the same level as what an animal does
eating a banana? Are images and ideas really the same? What about the creativity
of his own work, the evaluations, the concepts, the judgments, the progress, the
truth or error? His theory of knowledge did not seem to allow him the power of
writing about a theory of knowledge.
Kant claimed that knowledge has a threefold structure, sensibility,
understanding and reason. By sensibility we intuit phenomena; understanding
imposes the twelve categories on the intuitions of sensibility; reason imposes
regulative principles to organize all our knowledge. But his own thinking in
writing the Critique was more flexible, creative and original than the twelve
categories would allow. His actual judgments on the truth of his own philosophy,
his rejection of Descartes and Hume, don=t
seem to have a place in the content of the philosophy. His actual moral behavior
seems strangely different from applying a universal categorical imperative.
Descartes, Hume and Kant did not use a method of self-appropriation; they did
not check their conclusions - except partially perhaps - against the data of
their own consciousness. We cannot really expect them to have done so in their
age of the breakthrough to theory; historically we seem to advance only one step
at a time. Only at the end of the twentieth century do we seem to be ready for
self-appropriation and the third stage of meaning. [314]
Nevertheless, we do have to point out the fundamental incoherence in these
philosophers between the activities they performed and the content of their
theories of knowledge. Because they did not do self-appropriation they could not
articulate the dialectic unfolding in their own minds between sense and
intelligence, looking and knowing, the animal sense of the real and the real as
the correctly affirmed, the world of immediacy and the world mediated by
meaning. Being unaware of this dialectic they were unable to resolve it. And so
their theories reflect this unresolved dialectic, containing elements that are
truly and correctly affirmed in a confusion with other elements which are the
result of imagination and the animal criterion of the real.
Descartes, Hume, and Kant were the founders of modern philosophy; almost all
contemporary philosophy has derived from them either directly or indirectly, in
agreement or disagreement with them. The critique we have applied to them can be
applied to their followers and opponents. But just as they the founders were
unable to lay bare the root of the dialectic involved in correct human knowing,
so also their successors. Just as their philosophical positions are a
dialectical mixture of the real and the imagined, so also their successors. One
can point to individual improvements, advances and corrections, but there has
been no sweeping reorganization going to the root of the matter.
So our approach to other philosophical positions can only be an invitation to
self-knowledge: is what you are saying consistent with what you are doing? No
one likes to contradict himself; we are embarrassed if we are caught out in a
self-contradiction. But this is the most fundamental incoherence of which we can
be guilty. That is how you get to the root of the matter. This invitation to
check the consistency between performance and content applies to all schools of
philosophy, all varieties of contemporary or ancient philosophy. We have already
noted this in relation to skepticism and relativism; but it can also be applied
to process philosophy, to Marxism, to Structuralism, to Post-Modernism, to
Existentialism, etc.
That is how each one of us can return to the foundations and build the third
stage of meaning. We do not use this approach only to bash our opponents, but to
continually develop and clarify our own [315] position. It can be extremely
difficult to objectivize this dialectic, as we have seen in this chapter; there
is certainly room for more accurate studies, self-observation, improved
terminologies. In our time literature commonly indulges in self-observation and
acute descriptions of feelings, decisions, inner dramas and fears. Perhaps it
will become more common to describe how something was discovered, how concepts
emerged, how positions were seen to be valid, how the intellect actually works
in practice.
We mentioned earlier the possibility of learning from the mistakes of the
past. How can we profitably read from the history of philosophy which is so full
of mistakes, contradictions and confusions? Can all the data of the history of
philosophy be brought together as contradictory contributions to the one goal?
We somehow have to be able to account for the repeated mistakes of even great
philosophers. Having once identified this basic dualism in our own knowing, we
are in a position to be able to recognize it in others. We can understand any
philosopher by a combination of direct insights into his positive contributions
and inverse insights into the unquestioned imaginative assumptions within which
he posed his questions.
In all of the metaphors or ways of speaking about intellectual conversion we
noticed this dualism. On the one hand, we recognize an elementary knowing, a
simplification of the process of knowing to the analogy of looking. We note the
predominance of the image of confrontation, the 'in here' opposed to the 'out
there'. We recognize attempts to overcome this separation by means of various
bridges such as looking or intuition, or denials of the possibility of crossing
the bridge. All this we identified as a kind of sense knowledge of the 'body'
characterized by the biological pattern of experience.
On the other hand, we recognize the critical position: that knowing is by way
of judgments; that judgments presuppose understanding and experiencing; that
knowing is by way of an integrated structure of interrelated operations; that
judging uses imagination and images but is not dominated by them; that judgments
take place in the intellectual pattern of experience. The real is what is
affirmed in correct judgments. Imaginative schema no [316] longer dominate. In
explanatory knowing the image is a symbolic constructed image and is not
verifiable as an image.
We are in a position to distinguish these two kinds of knowing in our own
consciousness. We can also recognize this distinction at work in the history of
philosophy. It is the root source of contradictions and opposed positions in the
history of the discipline. We are able to discriminate between understandings
based on judgments reached in the intellectual pattern of experience, and
assumptions taken on board from the biological pattern of experience. We do not
have to just condemn those who disagree with our position, but can instead point
out the source of what we consider to be mistaken assumptions.
We have attained a viewpoint from which every philosophy can be judged
discriminatingly, on the basis of the root criterion of the source of error and
the source of correct understanding. We have attained a philosophy of
philosophies. That is the power of intellectual conversion.
Comments on Exercises.
- The reality of space is the reality that can be verified in movements,
distances, times, geometries, etc. What is real is the verified relations of
what Newton called relative space. What is not real is the imaginative
imperative to think of space as an empty receptacle waiting to be filled.
- Do you see causation or do you see succession of events? It depends on what
you mean by 'seeing'. If you mean by seeing the biological activity of vision
as in a cow, simply at the level of experience, then we do not see causes. But
if you mean by 'seeing', the experience of vision along with understanding and
judging, then you can see causes. You can know that the football player is
kicking the ball not because you see it, but because you see, you understand
and you judge about what you see. Knowing is not simply physical seeing, it is
a compound of cognitional operations. [317]
- The old Latin tag makes sense at the level of commonsense experience of
kicking, pushing, throwing, etc. Yet efficient causality is a verified
statement of a relation of cause and effect. Whether and when and how that
happens is a job for the scientists to find out. But even the scientists tend
to think in terms of images and have difficulty with action over a distance
unless there are a stream of particles passing over the distance to connect
physically the two bodies. They call them gravitons. If they are really
thought to be particles, or little marbles, then the imagination might be
satisfied but are they verifiable? Does this really help to explain action at
a distance? Even at the level of the imagination it seems to cause as many
problems as it solves.
- If you say that the laws of motion belong only in the mind, then you are in
danger of subjectivism. If you say that they belong also to the real world
then you have the problem of where are they? and you might, like Plato and
Popper, have to invent a place for them. Our approach is that the laws of
motion are a formulation of the intelligibility of matter in motion and to the
extent that they are verified they are real. Real does not mean out there now,
but the verified.
- It is not just a matter of degrees of complication. What is at issue is
different kinds of intelligibilities, different levels of things. Reductionism
reduces everything to the same level. Reductionism thinks of the real in terms
of 'bodies'. But we think in terms of unities, identities and wholes that are
distinguished from one another by their explanatory properties. Things are
grasped not by seeing alone, but by understanding and verifying. Just as laws
are verified in relations, things are verified as the terms of the relations.
- The soul has been much misunderstood and often rejected. Again it is a
problem of imagination and intelligence. If man is recognized as a unity,
identity, whole, different and distinct from animals by his activities of
knowing and deciding, then he is a different kind of thing. The traditional
philosophical term for this is form or soul. The human person does have a
[318] unity or integration of acts of different levels and we are justified in
saying that he is one thing, therefore one form, one soul. The soul is the
principle of unity and integration. Where is it? It is everywhere in the sense
that all the physical, chemical, biological and sensitive elements and
activities of man are subsumed into a new unity. The soul is localized by its
powers, the power to see is localized in the eyes and brain, the power to walk
in the legs, etc. Such was the answer of Aquinas and it makes sense. The
misunderstandings of soul come from trying to imagine it as a kind of ghost as
happens in Descartes.
End Notes
1 Bernard
Lonergan, A
Second Collection: Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S. J. Edited by William
Ryan and Bernard Tyrrell, (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1974) 79.
2 Insight, 573. Here Lonergan
distinguishes between the remote and proximate criterion of truth.
3 Bernard Tyrell, Christotheraphy etc
4 See Method in Theology, 237-244,
267-271. The term intellectual conversion is not used in Insight, but the
reality is there in other terminology. See also William Mathews,
"Intellectual Conversion and Science Education," in Lonergan
Workshop Vol. 5, 115-141. Also Richard M. Liddy, Transforming Light:
Intellectual Conversion in the Early Lonergan, (Minnesota: Liturgical Press,
1993).
5 Insight, 242.
6 Insight, 432. Lonergan explains the
per se infallibility of intelligence. If misunderstanding occurs it is always
because the imagination has presented only some of the data, or distorted data,
or no data.
7 Insight, 176. A bucket of water
suspended from a twisted rope is allowed to spin. Slowly the surface of the
water forms a hollow because of the centrifugal force of the spinning water.
Stop the spinning and the hollow will persist for a time. Newton argued that as
the hollow occurs both when the bucket is spinning and when it is stationary,
therefore the spinning must be in relation to an absolute space. This is quite
specious.
8 Insight, 283-284.
9 Metaphysics, Book 7, Chapter 17,
1041b 10-30. At this point Aristotle discovers that substance is the essence or
cause of the unity, identity of the thing. He used the syllable B A.
10 Theaetetus, 187-190.
11 Sophist, 242-246.
12 Theaetetus, 152c. The metaphor of
the Divided Line is to be found in the Republic at the end of Book VI and the
metaphor of the Cave at the beginning of Book VII.
13 Occasionalism claimed that the body
moved on the occasion of the mind deciding; God is the real cause, the mind is
the occasional cause. Parallelism, proposed by Malebranche, claimed that the two
realms of psychic and physical were preordained from the beginning to run
parallel and in harmony.
14 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure
Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith, (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1965) 41.
15 Idem 65.
16 Idem 65.
17 Idem 212.
18 Idem 213.
19 Insight, 252.
20 Merriam-Webster's Collegiate
Dictionary, tenth edition, (Springfield: Merriam-Webster, 1997).
21 Frederick
Copleston, A History of
Philosophy, vol. 2 Medieval Philosophy, (New York: Image Books, 1993) 498.
22 Henri Bergson (1859-1941) an influential
French philosopher who wrote, La pensée et le mouvant, L'évolution
créatrice; Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion. For a useful
summary see Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. 9 Modern
Philosophy: From the French Revolution to Sartre, Camus, and Lévi-Strauss ,
(New York: Image Books, 1994), 178-215.
23 Jacques Maritain, Preface to
Metaphysics,
24 Comparison between confrontation and
identity is a theme in Lonergan's Verbum, eg. 192-193.
25 Method in Theology, 238.
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