by Dr. David Fleischacker
Lonergan’s explanatory formulation of the interior structure of judgment dismantles one of the great culprits of the modern world that has left vast reaches of the Western world in a dark age. It is dark because it thwarts self-transcendence precisely in one of the great powers of the human mind. Judgement makes possible a real presence of a person to that which is. It mediates a true encounter with intelligible being. In other words, authentic judgment allows being to dwell within one. This darkness is the real forgetfulness of being. Heidegger was only partially right. He did recognize something that was true about the fallen state of us. But he still left one with out the ability to enjoy and rejoice in the goodness of even the littlest beings in the world. Those little, finite beings–trees, rocks, the human body, stars, planets–were merely ontic things. For him Being– the Ontological–was all that mattered, and even that notion lacks in Heidegger the liberty that Lonergan comes to discover. It is after all a transcendental notion.
When one proclaims that all is mere perspective, or one announces that one can never be sure of what truly is, or one thinks of reality as out there but not in here (in my head), then one is proclaiming that being is fundamentally unknown. It is as Kant said, in the noumena. This is the darkness in which today we are chained and enslaved. It is a self-inflicted cave of own’s own mind, and if one is completely honest, then Derrida is right, even that cave is a mere trace. It too resides in the darkness. Even my own thoughts flow in the differance of lost presence.
For most, I think the world of entertainment and work keeps them from facing this haunting darkness which they have absorbed since their day of birth. Many do escape into a world of common sense and do not bother with these questions. But if pushed in a direction they do not like, then as an instinctual mechanism of self-defense, they pull out the darkness of the no-nothings.
I remember one day saying to a friend, “don’t you know that you can’t find happiness in hockey — he loved hockey to the neglect of nearly everything. He was able to deconstruct my simple quest with one stutter of his vocal cords and a brush of air sent my way in the wave of a hand. I knew what he meant. He meant you can’t really know the answer to what you are asking. Don’t bother me with it.
Lonergan does not answer this deconstructive shallowness with the same brush of air and grunt. No such simplicity can be found with his response. Yet, amazingly, in one book he sends to the grave this particular darkness for any who want freedom from these chains that have been growing and entangling the Western world for 500 or more years. I suppose one could argue that it has been longer and started with the nominalists, but the other day, someone I know — Dr. Chris Blum — pointed out rightly that without the founders of modernity (Descartes, Hume, Kant, etc.), these nominalists would have been forgotten.
Lonergan in one book opens the doors to the cave. That book is Insight. He let’s in some light. We can discover that the shadows and traces of being are not our genie lamp. With the great skill of a gifted surgeon, Lonergan, at the beginning of the book, asks the reader to examine in themselves the act of understanding. It begins a journey into a massive world of interiority and self-appropriation. The attentive and careful reader who takes this journey is not asked to trust the writer in the end, though one must trust along the way. He leads the reader from insight in math and science to that of common sense and things, all before he turns to the excavating work of exploring judgment.
It is a brilliant plan as anyone knows who has seriously read the text. His first eight chapters remove the rocks that block the path to light and freedom, and then finally he removes the hinges of the locked doors of the cave.
Starting in chapter 9, he then begins to open the door. In chapter 11, the reader gets asked to walk out of the cave unless he or she is too afraid to do so and simply refuses to see the beauty and the landscape of being.
In the next couple of chapters, through the notion of being and then of objectivity, Lonergan provides an explanatory account of why we can be present to being, and why being can dwell within us. It gives the subject who has dwelt in the cave of the modern world a new wineskin and a new garment. More technically, it is a new heuristic foundation to taste the beauty and glory of the real universe of being.
I could repeat Lonergan’s answer with regard to the conditions required for true judgments and the principle notion of objectivity, and why these happen in us all the time. But for the full meaning of these explanatory formulations to burst forth and make sense, one really does need to travel down all of those earlier chapters of Insight first.
Hence, this blog you are reading is merely an invitation to those who have some inkling that perspectivalism and relativism are unhappy conclusions, and that traces of others are not so joyful as their real presence in filial and agapic bonds of love.
By the way, for those who are not able for various reasons to move into the explanatory account of the freedom and light of true judgment, do not worry. Lonergan’s account reveals that good sound judgment gives you that liberty even when you are unable to explain why. You really can love–in a mutual indwelling presence–your friend, your spouse, your child….and God, even if the how remains a mystery.