Lonergan opens his 14th chapter of Insight anticipating some of the “antitheses” against his previous three chapters on objectivity and being. In those three chapters, he explanatorily verified an answer to the question about knowing and being posed by modern philosophers such as Immanuel Kant. Is it possible to know “being” or “reality”? Some say no, some say yes. But to what he means by being, they would all say no. He says yes. Naturally those faithful to these modern figures will object and pose their antitheses.
One antithesis goes back to the ancient Greeks, namely the distinction of reality from appearance. Lonergan’s explanatory account rejects this at least as an epistemological claim.1 Lonergan places this claim within a false philosophy that constructs its view from animal types of knowing — the “already out there now real” as he is fond of naming this counter position. Here is the full quote,
Against the concrete universe of being, of all that can be intelligently grasped and reasonably affirmed, there stands in a prior completeness the world of sense, in which the ‘real’ and the ‘apparent’ are subdivision within a vitally anticipated ‘already out there now.’
The concrete universe of being which the human mind is capable of knowing on its own powers is that which one can “experience,” experiences which in turn make possible insights, insights which can be affirmed as true or false based on sufficient evidence. This position succinctly summarizes Lonergan’s path in the book up until this chapter, but its full meaning and affirmation takes effort to appropriate. Lonergan spent many chapters detailing the nature and conditions of insights. He walks one through insights in math (chapter 1) and science (chapters 2 – 5) and common sense (chapters 5 and 6), as well as an odd insight that grasps there is no insight to be had called an “inverse insight” and another into “things” (the unity-identity-whole). After that he turns to the affirmations of insights as true or the negation of insights as false and how that all works in interiority.
If you have attempted these chapters, you have entered into these vast arenas of the human mind in all walks of life. And if you are like me, you said “who knew so much was happening in our heads every minute of the day!!!” Lonergan uncovers vast ranges of interconnections between questions and images and insights and concepts and judgments during the course of these chapters. And in these chapters, he is not writing merely about an object — insight — but he is cajoling the reader into a deeper exploration of his or her own interior life. This is about the ancient art of self-knowledge. So it is not just a book about insight, but a book with the aim of self-knowledge, self-appropriation, a discovery of one’s own interiority.2
After completing these chapters on understanding and judgment, Lonergan then turns to a simple question that he wants the reader to engage personally, “Am I a knower?” and he lays out the conditions for a positive answer. If one has been exploring, deeply exploring, the meaning of the previous 10 chapters, one can then move forward to an authentically grounded judgement that “I am a knower.” And as a result, one can also give the reasons why one knows that one is a knower, and that this is not merely a provisional judgment such as one might find in science, or a serial judgment as one would find in math, but a judgment of complete certitude, what Lonergan calls a “virtually unconditioned judgment.”3 That is quite a claim in the modern world. I can know I am a knower because….. Much of the world would disagree, perhaps with a shoulder shrug or a rolling set of eyes, and if words emerge, one might hear, “well maybe, but not definitively.” “Can you really know anything let alone yourself?”
Lonergan does not stop at this point however. He turns to the next question, “If I am a knower, what is it that I know?” Over the next couple of chapters — twelve and thirteen — he formulates that what we know when we know is being. This too is a bold statement. And he does not just affirm it, but he explains what it means and why he can affirm it. For the last three or four centuries most philosophers had given up hope that we could know being with certitude. Some might say, well in faith we can, but reason cannot. But those individuals of “faith” were few and far between. Even they would agree with Kant that the “noumena” — things in themselves, reality as such — cannot be known with any certitude. Those of faith could agree with him because he was a man of faith. But, reason is of no real effect. This makes any exploration of the principles of being impossible. And since metaphysics was the exploration of the principles of being, it was not possible if knowing being was not possible. Lonergan disagrees. And he does so with certitude. And if he is right, then there is a place for metaphysics. It has a place in the arena of exploration. It deserves a spot in the university!
But let us return to those few words that caught our attention at the beginning of chapter 14. That small sentence, that small antithesis, at the beginning of the first of four chapters on metaphysics. This little quote is aimed at one of the most ancient epistemological mistakes. It is ancient but ever new. And so it is never old. It too finds itself built on sand because it is built on biological extroversion and the inadequate philosophy that springs from that starting point. For Lonergan, it is not that there is no such thing as biological extroversion. There is. But rather, the real point is that there is more; there is understanding, and there is judgment, and these have a character to them which allows one to be more than an animal, and it allows philosophers to say more than what animals are capable of understanding and knowing. And so how is this little antithesis that proclaims a real opposition between reality and appearance a “sub-division” based on the “already-out-there-now-real.”
To answer, let us start with appearance. “Appearance” most often refers to sight, as something manifested to our eyes, but really, it could be a presence to any of our senses. We hear a bird singing out the window. That too would be an appearance, or maybe we should invent a word, a “hearance.” It appears to our senses, but is not real. To quote Galileo “I think that tastes, odors, colors, …. reside only in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.” (Galileo Galilei, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. Stillman Drake, pages 274-275). Thus all sensory experiences are merely subjective with no objective correlate and basis.
Lonergan’s analysis proposes something different. All sensory experiences of things are not merely subjective but rather the relationship between an object and a subject. And when one begins to explore each of our senses and realize their grandeur, what emerges is a human sensory being that is capable of relating to many physical objects in this world. Our sight for example is capable of seeing most of the light energy that enters our atmosphere, the “visible” light spectrum. Our point is this, appearance is not merely subjective but rather it is the relationship of beings to us through our senses and sensory perceptions.
Getting insights into these sensory experiences leads to words and language that expresses things as they are related and known to us in our senses. Lonergan gives this the unexciting name, “descriptive” insights, concepts, and knowledge. “Redness” would be an example, as would “loud” or “rough.”
In this antithesis, “reality” is the counter to appearance, and so for Lonergan it too falls into that same “world” of the extroverted “already-out-there-now.” Galileo can help us on this point too. He identifies “primary qualities” as the really real. Those “appearances” or “secondary” qualities are merely subjective. What are these primary qualities? Shape, number, size, motion, solidity. These are measurable. But notice, these are also imaginative but in a more subtle, derivative way compared to those characteristics that are “mere appearance.” It would be like the image of the electrons zipping around the nucleus of an atom. That image is derivative.4 That is Galileo’s really real. One could replace this with the imaginative synthesis of genes in a cell, or the imaginative synthesis of cells constituting an organism.5 Lonergan reveals that these “primary qualities” are really just refined images, hence also part of the “extroverted” “out there now real.”
Thus neither appearance or “secondary qualities” nor “imagined syntheses” or “primary qualities” are being. Rather, both types constitute a relationship between the object imagined and the subject who is imagining. Both illustrate things to us, thus both are a sub-division within the extroverted knowledge of the world that we share with cats. But neither rises to being. So it is an antithesis that literally misses the argument.
- By “epistemological claim” I mean the relationship of a cognitive act to its object. In the case of “reality” vs. “appearance” the epistemic claim is that cognitively “mere appearance” is not knowing anything about reality, but is merely subjective. This might be something like “those who think the earth is flat” are seeing it by “mere appearance,” but “the reality is that it is a sphere.” The same with those who say the sun does not rise or set, for that is mere appearance, but rather, the earth spins on its axis, and that is the reality. Or again, the stars and sun do not revolve around the earth, but the earth around the sun. In all case relativity of frames of references reveal that all of these are “sensate” constructs. Things could, for example, revolve around the earth if one sets the center of the frame of reference as the earth. Or it could be the sun if it is the center, or the black hole at the center of our galaxy. Or I could set it to the moon if I so wished. All these would be correct. ↩︎
- And one might ask, why should I care about self-knowledge. There are many facets to this, starting with the fact that you exist and are worthy of knowing. But there is more as well, self-knowledge is essential to have a good life because you cannot “drive” what you do not understand, and what is more important than being in the driver’s set of one’s own being?? And secondly, a civilization needs individuals, as many as possible, who have risen from the muddling animal world of the “extrovert here and out there now real”, to something more creative, more intelligent, more responsible, more loving. And that requires this shift to self-knowledge. As well, such a shift within a civilization makes possible the mediation of many facets of the society that otherwise remain in the dark. Everything from economics and politics to pop-culture and science, and at the apex, religion, all are deeply connected to conscious intentionality and interiority (hence meaning), and so self-knowledge becomes key for understand the heart of all human activities. When a civilization has shifted into mediating its institutions and communities in terms of interiority analysis, it has entered the “third stage of meaning” (Method in Theology, 85-96). ↩︎
- Insight, 305-306. ↩︎
- For Lonergan, these imaginative syntheses that are derived from the implicitly defined terms and relations of a theory do have a heuristic place still, but they are not “epistemically” “reality” or “being.” It is the affirmed explanatory account of something that is about “being” (Insight, 114-117). ↩︎
- Lonergan would note that what is key philosophically is not the imaginative synthesis, but rather the functional relations genes have to all the other metabolic processes; or the functional relations cells have to other cells within the entire dynamics of an organism living in its ecosystem. And one could add that these also have operator and integrator relations within developments, and it is those intelligibilities that constitute the intelligibility of these “beings.” And so to repeat, the imaginative synthesis does have a place in all this, just not a fully epistemic one. ↩︎