Background
Lonergan, Bernard was born on December 17, 1904 in Buckingham, Quebec.
Lonergan, Bernard was born on December 17, 1904 in Buckingham, Quebec.
Heythrop College and Gregorian University.
19531965, Gregorian University. 1966-1970, Regis College, Toronto. 1973-1983, Boston College.
Bernard Lonergan was the main exponent in English of what is sometimes called ‘transcendental Thomism’. This emerged from a confrontation. and a partial synthesis, of some elements oj Kantian method with Thomistic realism, initiated earlier in the century by Maréchal. A fundamental principle in Lonergan’s philosophy is his definition of being as ‘the objective of the pure desire to know’. Reality, that is, has a structure which lS isomorphic with the structure of knowledge. It follows that a description and a theory of knowledge is a precondition and the foundation 0 metaphysics. A knowledge of knowledge leads to a knowledge of what is known, and what is know n is what there is. This methodological priority of epistemology over metaphysics was strongly contested h> Thomists such as Gilson, for whom a philosophy that began with a study of consciousness could never escape from it and arrive at the extra-menta world. Gilson pointed to Descartes and Kant as philosophers who conspicuously failed in this respect. Transcendental Thomists, however, would claim that Kant’s view that we cannot know things in themselves was a kind of failure o nerve. If Kant had exploited his own critica method to the full, he would have come to realize that the very concept of knowledge is itself ■ntelligible and possible only on the prior assumpll°n of real objects and properties which are °bjects for knowledge, and which are actually known by the knowing subject. For Lonergan, then, philosophy begins with •he attempt to know what knowing is. The very Possibility of knowing what knowing is is inherent ln the nature of consciousness. Knowing is a conscious activity, and consciousness is an bareness immanent in cognitional acts. The knowing of which we are aware has a threefold character: empirical, intellectual and rational. As enipirical, knowing is sensing, perceiving and ■niagining. As intellectual, knowing involves the act of understanding and the formation ol concepts. As rational, knowing culminates in affirmations of what there is. These are not three types or stages of knowing, but constitute a dynamic unity. All knowing requires a process of insight’, which is the name he uses for the act ol understanding a set of data. Insight is exemplified in Archimedes’s cry ‘Eureka’, and in fhe slaveboy in Plato’s Meno. The early chapters of Insight provide a detailed analysis of the activity °f knowing in mathematics, the empirical sciences and common sense. The dynamic, historically evolving, methodoogically diverse character of knowing makes it P'ain that reality cannot be conceived of as a static universe ruled by classical laws of physics. Lonergan describes it rather as ‘emergent probability’, a Phrase designed to indicate that the universe onctions as much by statistical probabilities as by o assical laws. When reality is conceived of as the nowable, as something ‘proportionate’ to human ^ognition, it can be said to ave three components: ‘potency’ is the componem that is experienced or imagined; ‘form’ is the f^Ponent that is known by the understanding; X*ct is the component known by the judgement of ‘the object of desire’. However, one of the things that we desire is knowledge, and this desire generates a second sense of good: the good of order, as instantiated in the state, the economy or the family. Good refers here to states of affairs which are rationally and purposefully designed, willed and constructed to satisfy our desires. Good as the object of rational choice presents itself as value. On the ontological level, good refers to every kind of order and, at its limit, to the intelligibility intrinsic in being. Moral choices involve four elements: sensible and imaginative representations: practical insight; practical reflection; and decision. One of the peculiarities of human knowing is that, although we have an unrestricted desire to know, we have a limited capacity to know. Thus, ‘the range of possible questions is larger than the range of possible answers’. This consideration leads Lonergan to the postulation of transcendent being, that is to say, being that is beyond us, which is ‘without the domain of man’s outer and inner experience’. Transcendent being, however, must be presumed to be intelligible, and this leads to the logical possibility of an unrestricted act of understanding, whose object includes transcendent as well as proportionate being. Its object would also include self-understanding. Such an understanding would be one of the characteristics of God. The affirmation of what God is, and the affirmation that God is, are different matters. Lonergan believes that many of the arguments for the existence of God are included in the general form: if the real is completely intelligible. God exists. But the real is completely intelligible. Therefore, God exists.’ However, Lonergan does not think that this argument will persuade someone who was hitherto an agnostic or an atheist that God exists. Its function rather is, like that of St Anselm’s proof, to demonstrate to those who already believe in God that their belief is rationally grounded and defensible. Lonergan is regarded by some as having one of the most powerful philosophical minds of the twentieth century, but he is not widely known outside Thomistic circles.