Declan Marmion has gathered a host of international specialists to explore their respective legacies by examining not only Karl Rahner, and Bernard Lonergan’s contribution to anthropology, systematic, historical, moral and practical theology and spirituality, and thus bringing their insights into dialogue with many of the issues facing Christians today.
242 pp, Veritas, 2005. To purchase this book online, go to www.veritas.ie .
CONTENTS
Contributors
Abbreviations
Introduction: Celebrating Rahner and Lonergan
Declan Marmion and Raymond Moloney
1. The Mystery of the Human
1. The Mystery of the Human:A Perspective from Lonergan
William Mathews
2. The Mystery of the Human: A Perspective from Rahner
Michael McCabe
11. Theology in a New Context: The Contributions of Rahner and Lonergan to the Renewal of Theology after Vatican II
3. Expanding Lonergan’s Legacy: Belief, Discovery and Gender
Cynthia Crysdale
4. Karl Rahner’s Contribution to Interreligious Dialogue
Dermot A. Lane
111. The Situation of Theology in Contemporary Ireland
Theology in Ireland: Changing Contours and Contexts
Eamonn Conway
Theology in Ireland: Changing Contours and Contexts – A Response
Linda Hogan
IV. Christian Identity in a Postmodern Age
Christian Identity in a Postmodern Age: A Perspective fram Lonergan
Michael Paul Gallagher
Christian Identity in a Postmodern Age: A Perspective frain Rahner
Declan Marmion
V. Spirituality and Religious Experience
Attende tibi ipsi: A Note on Lonergan and Spirituality
Hilary Mooney
Spirituality and Religious Experience: A Perspective fram Rahner
Philip Endean
Rahner and Lonergan on Spirituality
Raymond Moloney
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Review |
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Chapter One
The Mystery of the Human: A Perspective from Lonergan
After a survey of some anthropological challenges from science, literature and history the present chapter turns to the anthropologies of Lonergan’s Insight and Method in Theology. It concludes with some reflections on the significance of his notion of human historicity.
1. The Human Mystery in the Life Sciences
In an interview published in the New York Times on 13 April 2004, shortly before he died of cancer, Francis Crick, the celebrated co-discoverer of DNA made some highly revealing remarks. He was obsessed, he admitted, from very early on in his career by two problems, ‘the borderline between the living and the non-living and the nature of consciousness.’ It is a strong statement about the intellectual desires which motivated him and which, in their own way, gave his life its particular shape, its intellectual identity. He wanted to get to the bottom of these mysteries and, in his later years, did not welcome invitations for public appearances as they interrupted his train of thought.
With James Watson in 1953 he discovered that the chemical DNA was basic to all organic life. It seems to have been his conclusion, as was that of Watson, that DNA contained, so to speak, the secret of life. Since its discovery life was now reduced to chemistry. When Crick moved on to the problem of explaining consciousness something of the same mind-set remained. As the secret of organic life was hidden in DNA, so the secret of consciousness, the human mystery is hidden in a sub-set of the neural structures of the brain. When we have discovered them, the DNA so to speak, of consciousness, we will have unveiled its secret. My own view is that the life principles in the living cell manipulate the DNA rather than the opposite as insights manipulate images and cannot be reduced to them.
The quest to unpack the secret of consciousness became Crick’s passion. Involved in it was his peculiarly reductionist anthropology, reductionism being, as Edward Wilson’s book, Consilience, makes clear, the religious faith of very many scientists. (I) In that spirit Crick, in his book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul wrote:
Your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (2)
Against the belief of Colin McGinn and Stephen Pinker, who maintain that an ultimate explanation of consciousness will elude us, Crick believes that it is within our reach. When reached it will result in the death of the soul, at which point educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, no life after death.
What is clear from this is that Francis Crick, for all his brilliance, and I highly respect that, has never read Aristotle’s Peri Psyches, that is to say, on the psyche or soul. For Aristotle the soul is the life principle of the body – organic, sensory and intellectual. It is also, in its intellectual dimension of the agent intellect, the principle of all intellectual inquiry in the empirical sciences. Francis Crick is a wonderful example of the activity of what Aristotle means by the intellectual soul arguing that it does not exist. He has no interest in getting to the bottom of the desires in himself that motivate his quest to master DNA and the neural basis of consciousness.
Despite this, geneticists and the life scientists have made an outstanding contribution to the extremely thorny problem of demolishing the colonial notion of race. Stemming from the coloniser’s view of their conquests there arose the notion of a hierarchy of races, from the less primitive and ignorant to the more advanced and intelligent. This disturbing attitude to human differences reached its high point as recently as the early 1940s in the master race theory of the Third Reich. In 1996 in their work African Exodus: The Origins of Modern Humanity, Chris Stringer and Robin McKie began to make available to a wider public the emerging theory of the African origins of the entire human family.(3) In one fell swoop the earlier theories of a master and subordinate races were destroyed. Biologically, we are all parts of one and the same tree of life. This has been further developed in Stephen Oppenheimer’s Out of Eden which, on the basis of genetics and culture, has established that the entire world outside of Africa was populated by a migration of an African population of some 250 individuals across the sea to the Yemen around 80,000 years ago. (4)
There is involved in this one of the most fascinating paradigm shifts of our time, but there is a sting in the tail concerning the problem of the defining features of the human being. Many of the modern anthropologists who address the question about human origins tend towards the view that what we think of as defining human features; language, culture and the human form of consciousness are largely biological refinements of our animal predecessors.
2. Walker Percy and Literature
Turning next to literature, I single out from many possible sources the searching of Walker Percy, brought to my attention by Paul Elie’s engaging The Life You Save May Be Your Own, An American Pilgrimage. (5) Percy was educated in the sciences as part of his training as a doctor but contracted TB and during his rehabilitation read the works of Camus, Sartre and especially Kierkegaard. As a result he became a writer, married and became a Catholic. Why did he become a Catholic? Because, according to Carl Olson, of the anthropological problem:
Percy rightly dismissed the notion that people can live without an anthropological vision, that is, a specific understanding of who man is and what he is meant for. ‘Everyone has an anthropology,’ he wrote in the essay, ‘Rediscovering a Canticle for Leibowitz.’ ‘There is no not having one. If a man says he does not, all he is saying is that his anthropology is implicit, a set of assumptions which he has not thought to call into question.’ His own conversion was due, in large part, to the realization that scientism – the belief that the scientific method and the technology it produces can provide answers to man’s deepest questions and longings – was untenable and, in fact, was a lie. (6)
To which Percy added:
This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you make of it and have to answer: scientific humanism. That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore, I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, God. (7)
According to Elie, when Percy made the transition from being a doctor who believed in the world view of the sciences to an author whose task was to diagnose the human condition, he needed some measure of the human to aid him on his task.
This is what he claimed he found in Catholicism, and specifically in what he called Christian anthropology. Catholicism, as he put it, considers the human person part angel, part beast. It locates the divided human nature at the center of its scheme and asks the right questions: Why are so many of us unhappy? Why is there such cruelty in the world? It also gives a powerfully suggestive answer: The human person – as Percy understood it – is a creature suspended between two infinities, a pilgrim and wayfarer. We don’t know quite where we came from or where we are going. Man is born to trouble ‘as the sparks fly up’. (8)
His breakthrough in his quest came in the sanatorium when he read Kierkegaard’s famous passage ‘describing Hegel as the philosopher who lived in a shanty outside the palace of his own system and saying that Hegel knew everything and said everything, except what it was to be born and to live and to die.’ (9) Hegel left out the one thing worth knowing, the significance of the individual life. Many modern thinkers have settled everything ‘except what it is to live as an individual. He still has to get through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. .. What does this man do with the rest of the day? The rest of his Iife (l0) The challenge here is to try and understand how we ought to live our individuality, our unique providentially ordained selfhood. Any contemporary anthropology has to acknowledge that the sheer range of the extremes that we find in individual human lives are perplexing, from a hospice nurse to a hostage taker or murderer, from a psychopath to a saint. In short, every individual is their own distinct solution to the problem of living but those solutions are not worked out in solitary isolation from others. In The Human Condition Hannah Arendt makes clear that it is through the interaction of diversities of human forms of life that individual life stories emerge. (11) Our twenty-first century anthropological landscape and context, moreover, are framed and shaped by a sense of fragmentation, of childhood from old age, public life from private. This emphasis on parts leaves us with no sense of the unity that we are or of the social world to which we belong. (12) The complexity of our own lives and world is largely beyond our comprehension.
As well as the great human creativity illustrated in twentieth century science and technology, literature and art, historical studies such as those of Anthony Beevor’s three books on Stalingrad, Berlin and the The Spanish Civil War must also come into the anthropological equation.(13) Daniel Levinson in his discussion of mid-life in his Seasons of a Mans Life draws our attention to the polarity of creativity and destructiveness.(14) Beevor’s books are epics of human destructiveness. The sheer dehumanisation of ordinary Russian and German folk in the course of those wars, the depths of depravity which emerged from them, more than astonish. They point to the fundamental anthropological thesis of Hannah Arendt that in totalitarian regimes there is a culture of death and individual lives are worthless. Such possibilities, it seems, are always latent in the human community. A contemporary anthropology can thus have no illusions any more. Anthropologists must struggle to become open to the full range of the human condition as presented in the totality of their world culture and history and the questions it brings to them.
3. The Anthropology of Insight
Every human work, a book or an artefact, even a form of life has both its cultural and anthropological presuppositions and significance. These may be direct or indirect. The author may in fact express or comment directly on their view of the human being and related human condition, as in Picasso’s Guernica or in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. More indirectly the works may reveal to us something about the values and disvalues of their authors as human and their related form of life.
From this perspective if one reads the first eight chapters of Insight one will quickly see a division there between an engagement, on the one hand, with the very technical disciplines of mathematics and the empirical sciences, and on the other, with the very dramatic and intersubjective realm of common sense and its world of community and history. Insight presupposes that we are all members, in our own ways, of such relatively advanced communities with their horizons or worlds. What it is attempting to do is to make sense of that fact, to understand the implicit mind-world relations that are involved.
The Scientific Community and World – the Desire of the Mind
The mathematical and scientific forms of life are, for Lonergan, the example, par excellence of the human desire to understand, explain, make sense of and master, and, in those pursuits of the experience of the intellectual pattern of experience:
Deep within us all, emergent when the noise of other appetites is stilled, there is a drive to know, to understand, to see why, to discover the reason, to find the cause, to explain. Just what is wanted, has many names. In precisely what it consists, is a matter of dispute. But the fact of inquiry is beyond all doubt. It can absorb a man. (15)
In this context we can think of the intellectual passion to understand of an Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Freud, Crick and Chomsky. Anthropologically, Lonergan is interested in what it is that is in us all in different degrees that gives rise to these lives. He also makes it clear that it is one thing to be characterised by an unusual desire to understand some feature of one’s world, it is another thing to understand that mental performance. What exactly do we mean by the eros of the mind? What is it like and what is it or?
In response Lonergan offers the reader a series of intellectual exercises whose goal is to enable them to develop a heightened awareness of their potential intellectual curiosity and the manner in which it structures their knowing on the levels of the senses and imagination, understanding and conceptualisation, and finally of judgment. Usually students develop a familiarity with the language of desire or puzzlement and insight, and feel they have some form of mastery of the problem of consciousness. Unfortunately, as is frequently the case, language can conceal much more than it reveals, and thus can conceal “that it ought to be disclosing, namely, the startling strangeness of the mental. Let me see if I can shock you into appreciating that startling strangeness.
In the preface to Insight Lonergan remarks that it is his goal to work out a philosophy based on an insight into insight, compare it with one based on insight into oversights, and so get to the roots of the problem of progress and decline. This night sound plausible but it poses fascinating and disturbing questions about the nature of consciousness. The problem is that, for Aquinas, insights are into phantasms, that is to say, imaginative presentations or data, this being the case even for our knowledge of God. It is also the case that what they grasp is not the presentations as sensible but what they represent, these being beyond the capabilities of our senses and imagination. But our desire to understand and the insights it seeks in response as conscious activities of the cognitional subject are a real but unimaginable conscious awareness. Because the desire that moves and the event of insight cannot be imagined, neither can they be directly represented in an image or phantasm. If this is the case, there can be no insights directly into insights or into any other conscious aspects of human cognition such as judgment. If we are to understand intellectual desire as conscious it will not be directly, through some form of inner intellectual look. It will come about indirectly through the medium of an appropriate language which articulates the details of the problem-solving performance as a whole, the matter, so to speak, of which the desire and related insights are the form.
The Common Sense Community and World – the Conflict of Consciousness.
If the chapters on science presuppose the intellectual world, with its emphasis on mathematics and science, in which Lonergan was educated, those on common sense presuppose the historical world in which he lived and experienced, especially during his Rome years in the 1930s. The same intellectual capacities that operate in science also operate in the life of the subject and worlds of common sense. But there is a difference. Whereas in science the human animal, so to speak, has to recede, in common sense it can be a dominant factor. Lonergan uses the terms ‘polymorphism’ and ‘dialectic’ to discuss this core tension within human consciousness: ‘the tension between incompletely developed intelligence and imperfectly adapted sensibility grounds the dialectics of individual and social history.’ (16)
What exactly he means by our human sensibility, human intersubjectivity, human spontaneity and intersubjective spontaneity, is problematic. Simone de Beauvoir deals with essentially the same problem in her Ethics of Ambiguity in terms of the language of ambiguity. Referring back to the Athenian myth of human origins as in the earth rather than in the gods, she continues that there is a fundamental ambiguity to human life. Every human exists at the same time in two realms: ‘he is still part of the world of which he is a consciousness.’ (I7) Rooted as they are in the earth, humans can transcend their material origin in thought, but they can never escape it. For de Beauvoir, the ambiguity of the human condition is, as for Kierkegaard, tragic.
Materialist philosophers reduce one side of this pair, mind, to the other, matter or embodiment; idealists do the opposite. Dualists settle for a permanent standoff in which both co-exist in the individual human being, in Francois Jeanson’s words, ‘like eternal strangers’ (17) For de Beauvoir, following Hegel on master and slave, the ambiguity of human existence has profound implications for the way we relate to others, for there is in our earthy nature an instinctive and spontaneous will to power, a desire to dominate the other and to establish sovereignty.
For Lonergan the tension between incompletely developed intelligence and imperfectly adapted sensibility expresses itself in the biases of common sense, dramatic, individual, group and general. In each of these, individually and collectively in the members and leaders of the group or nation, our spontaneous sensibilities inhibit our freedom to raise and pursue important questions which are significant for the proper conduct of our lives. The biases that result shape the dialectics of individual and social history. What his analysis needs to bring out much more forcefully is the harm which those biases cause in the interpersonal domain. By dramatic bias is meant all those realms of our own personal experiences in the daily drama of our lives in relation to which we are in denial. By individual bias is meant all those realms where we cultivate a philosophy of individualism which always puts us first at the expense of others. By group bias Lonergan is referring to situations when a particular group and its leaders, the patriarchy or a particular powerful ethnic or religious group, puts itself forward in relation to other groups as the dominant group at the centre of the universe. What is involved is not an intellectual game as the suffering caused by the racism that Martin Luther King tried to face down in the US in the ’60s or Nelson Mandela in South Africa shows. By general bias Lonergan means the inability of common sense to understand that it cannot think on the level of history and that if it does not understand the limits of its competence then chaos will result. The biases of common sense and their consequences are the product of a core conflict at the heart of the human. In Insight, it could be argued, Lonergan does not adequately articulate just how deep the conflict between these two orientations in human consciousness runs and the interpersonal and social violence of its consequences.
4. The Anthropology of Method in Theology
In contrast with the passionate intellectualism of Insight, Method in Theology, written to help him convalesce from a severe and life-threatening encounter with lung cancer, during which he experienced profound care and love by a nursing sister, reads differently. It presupposes that the theologian is a member of a religious community and culture and that the human community is at every point in its history faced with the challenge of differentiating between progress and decline – ‘A civilization in decline digs its own grave with a relentless consistency. It cannot be argued out of its selfdestructive ways. (19) In this context a theology becomes a reflection on the religion of a culture.
Although Method lacks the expansiveness of Insight and its minimalism needs to be opened up, there is a new emphasis in it on feelings and love: ‘Intermediate between judgments of fact and judgments in value lie apprehensions of value; such apprehensions are given in feelings.’ (20) That feelings respond to values in accordance with some scale of preferences needs to be acknowledged as well as the fact that there can also be aberrant feelings.
This emphasis on the relation between feelings and values is part of his growing awareness of the greater significance of the ethical. Beginning shortly after Insight, by his 1964 essay, ‘Existenz and Aggiornamento,’ he was stating that the being of the subject is a becoming in which decision making is central. The magnitude of this shift, the enlargement of his vision of the human from a pursuit of being to a pursuit of the worthwhile and the prominence in it of the role of feelings, is quite startling. If the heart of Insight could be summed up in terms of an effort to understand our intellectual passion, Method could be summed up as an effort to understand our ethical passion. That passion, deep within us, emerges when the noise of other appetites is stilled as a drive to find something worthwhile to do in the world and, in creatively building up that good, to become someone worthwhile. That project for him can never be achieved in isolation and so in section 6 of chapter two on ‘The Human Good’ in Method in Theology, a sketch is offered of the meshing of the individual and the social processes. But again the analysis is minimal and needs to be expanded.
Religion
As the pursuit of the human good of order is a social collaboration, so Lonergan has remarked that religion is both personal and a social good of order. And it is on the religious level that his philosophy of the self further expands into the interpersonal:
… [B]eyond the moral operator that promotes us from judgments of facts to judgments of value with their retinue of decisions and actions, there is a further realm of interpersonal relations and total commitment in which human beings tend to find the immanent goal of their being and, with it, their fullest joy and deepest peace. (21)
The potential latent in our core desires for truth and value, what Lonergan names the transcendental notions, becomes self-transcending, an achievement when one falls in love. As human love leads to a sharing of knowledge not otherwise accessible, so faith is the knowledge that is born of religious love. ‘In the light of faith, originating value is the divine light and love, while terminal value is the whole universe… Without faith, without the eye of love, the world is too evil for God to be good, for a good God to exist.’ (22) This, in turn, enables us to cope with the betrayals, humiliations and failures in life. When that sense of being loved is absent life becomes trivialised and harsh, power ruthlessly exercised, and existence absurd. (23)
Genuine religion is discovered and realised by redemption from the many traps of religious aberration. Religious development goes beyond the opposition between contrary propositions to engage directly with real and conflicting oppositions within the human family of individuals and groups. In this a religion is clearly distinct from its theology. Its educator is not just some a priori construction of categories but also the discerning study of human history. It follows that the love of God that religion calls forth is anything but an opium of the people. It does not directly eliminate the conflicts within consciousness already noted but makes them bearable. Personal and social religious development entails a constant struggle with a core conflict at the heart of religious consciousness between the polarities of true and false love. All of this points to the need for a theological anthropology that is rooted in the study of history and in the concrete details of the problem of the self and the other such as we find in Levinas and Simone de Beauvoir.
In a striking passage in the foreword to his The Way to Nicea Lonergan acknowledges that there is both live and dead religion. The creativity of a religion can be discerned in its emergence, in its vital acceptance, in living it day by day, in bringing about the adjustments to cultural variation and changing circumstances that the very vitality of a religion demands. So it is, as Wilfred Cantwell Smith remarked, that ‘All religions are new religions, every morning. For religions do not exist in the sky somewhere elaborated, finished, and static; they exist in men’s hearts.’24 Lonergan’s various remarks on religion suggest the need for a book on that topic which, unfortunately, he never wrote.
5. Historicity and the Human Mystery.
After Method in Theology, in his 1977 essay ‘Natural Right and Historical Mindedness,’ the theme of historicity is addressed by Lonergan, a notion of immense anthropological significance:
A contemporary ontology would distinguish two components in concrete human reality: on the one hand, a constant, human nature; on the other hand a variable, human historicity. Nature is given to man at birth. Historicity is what man makes of man.(25)
In that essay Lonergan gestures towards the richness and complexity of the notion: To understand the constant, nature, one may study any individual. But to understand the variable, historicity, one has to study each instance in its singularity.’ (26) The implication is that from the perspective of historicity every human being is uniquely distinct, every becoming self is singular, a unique creation which cannot be replaced by or substituted for by someone else. Human beings are not a dime a dozen. There is involved in the addition of historicity to nature an enormous expansion of anthropological horizons that impacts on all the previous points.
For Lonergan the structure or nature of our desire to know and act in the world expresses the conditions of being an authentic person. It is a matter of being attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible. But he adds a further precept: ‘Moreover, since the actuation of the structure arises under social conditions and within cultural traditions, to the four there may be added a fifth, acknowledge your historicity.’ (27) There is a recognition here that, like Hegel, one can assimilate the nature of one’s cognitional and ethical structure but that does not help one directly to live one’s own particular life with its specific problem solving challenges. Appropriating the historicity of one’s desires is a matter of understanding the problems which one’s society and culture call on one to engage with, not in the abstract, but concretely. Different chapters in one’s intellectual and ethical history will throw up the different problems which, together, make up the storyline, the form or soul of our embodied historicity.
This in turn poses questions such as: how well can we understand the historicity of our own desires or of the desires of another person? Francis Crick did not seem to understand his very well. How well can the desire, and related form of life which authored Insight, be understood? These are challenges concretely faced by autobiographers and biographers, the masters of human historicity.
My response to this challenge was helped by a quote by the movie director, Ingmar Bergman about his experience of writing his autobiography. Bergman was the author and producer of such movies as: The Seventh Seal (1956), Wild Strawberries, (1957), Through a Glass Darkly (1960), Persona (1965), and Cries and Whispers (1971). When he came to reflect on his life in order to write his autobiography he remarked:
Watching forty years of my work over the span of one year turned out to be unexpectedly upsetting, at times unbearable. I suddenly realized that my movies had mostly been conceived in the depths of my soul, in my heart, my brain, my nerves, my sex, and not least, in my guts. A nameless desire gave them birth. Another desire, which can perhaps be called ‘the joy of the craftsman,’ brought them that further step where they were displayed to the world. (28)
Bergman acknowledged with puzzlement that all his movies were expressions of some unfathomable desire in him, as well as being explorations of human relations. All creative works in this sense are expressions of some aspect of the desires of their authors, even those of Francis Crick, and in this sense are anthropologically revealing. But it seems to have been Bergman’s conclusion that it was impossible to figure out those desires, figure out what they are really like and for, because they were too elusive.
Significant in my quest to understand the historicity of Lonergan’s desire was the discovery of the beginnings, the awakenings of his desire as an author to the big questions which he was going to pursue. Between 1926 and 1938 Lonergan’s desire to understand was awakened by four distinct problems, the Kantian problem of thought and reality – the mind-world relation; the explanation of the economic cycle; the problem of progress and decline in history; and finally, in 1938, the problem of method in theology. What is significant is that the awakening of his desire is not something that happens inside his solitary consciousness, so to speak. In each case the potential to wonder is awakened and called forth by circumstances and events in the world, a philosophy course, the economic depression, the collapse of European history, and his doctoral dissertation on grace and freedom.
Awakenings are followed by journeying in which in their own erratic way the questions grow and call forth insights. One enters this process by posing questions such as – how did his philosophy courses and teachers influence him? What mark did the books he read leave on his quest? What people were influential in shaping the structure and direction of his questioning? What good luck and bad luck did he endure? What moments of insight did he enjoy? Significant in that process are the moments of decision to author a particular text. In 1943 Lonergan decided to author the Verbum articles, in 1945 Insight, in 1958 Method in Theology. In those decisions are revealed his core values as an author.
Authoring here refers to a time when, although one might not yet have all the necessary insights, the shape of the problems involved has reached maturity. So it was with Insight. When he started writing the problems had a certain shape out of which the book grew. In the course of writing he had a whole series of insights into the problem of thought and reality, into cognitional structure, the principal notion of objectivity, emergent probability, the dialectical structure of the development of common sense. Between 1951 and 1953 the process of authoring Insight was explosive, titanic. After1965 when authoring Method in Theology, the mood of the process was that of a convalescent.
Engaging with these elements challenges us to comprehend the 28 year journey of the desire of the author that began at Heythrop in 1926 and ended with the completion of Insight in 1954 and its publication in 1957. We can of course follow the public face of the desire, of the vision quest with its beginning, journeying and its chapters, time to decide and the time to compose, a public face that also has its expression in conversations, letters, texts, etc.
If the public face of the desire to know is called forth by problems in the world, it is also the case that that face is but one of the two inseparable dimensions of the core desire of the author. As it engages with problems and situations in its world it is at the same time accompanied by an inseparable conscious self-awareness of being in the tension of inquiry which, in a sense, is private. Only when that tension is stilled by the final text, despite its limitations or even imperfections, is the authoring process complete. That conscious tension which always accompanies the engagement of the desires and related journeys of Lonergan, Bergman, Crick, of you and me, concretely with problems and situations in the world can never be severed from its public expression. A great deal of twentieth century thought has tried to eliminate the way in which the desires of an author relate to his or her texts from the process of interpretation. To lose sight of the selfconsciousness of the author as the producer of the text is to distort or empty the human being of its core meaning.
My conclusion was that the more I tried to master that desire in its conscious dimension, attempted to reduce it to the level of the familiar, even tame it, the stranger and more mysterious but also, paradoxically, the more real it became. Human consciousness is constituted by a desire structure that is always moving beyond its present achievement, is never satisfied, and as conscious is strangely unimaginable, even irreducibly mysterious. Lonergan, I believe, does not, adequately underline this fact. At the heart of the human journeys of Lonergan, Bergman, Francis Crick, of you and me, is a startlingly strange and mysterious emergent desire, an unimaginable, given, conscious self-awareness. Impossible to read in the early stages or even for most of our lives, though, in some instances with recollection in one’s mature years, its strange presence and shape can be faintly detected as emerging and shaping one’s historicity. Eventually, to pose the question, ‘What are those emergent desires in you like and for?’ is, in the company of Walker Percy but not Francis Crick, to have found and addressed your mystery.
Notes
Edward Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, London: Abacus 1999, p. 58.
Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis, London: Simon and Schuster, 1994, p. 3.
Chris Stringer and Robin McKie, African Exodus: The Origins of Modern Humanity, London: Pimlico, 1996.
Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden, The Peopling of the World, London: Robinson, 2004.
Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, An American Pilgrimage, New York: Farrer, Strauss and Giroux, 2003.
Carl E. Olson, Travelling with Walker Percy,’ Saint Austin Review 2003, taken from: http://carl-olson.comlarticles/wpercy_star.html.
Ibid., pp. 2-3.
Elie, op. cit., p. 160.
Ibid, p. 142.
Olson, op cit., p. 3.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, pp. 175f.
Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue, A Study in Moral Theory, London: Duckworth, 1985, p. 204.
Anthony Beevor, The Spanish Civil War, London: Cassell, 1999; Stalingrad, London: Penguin Books, 1999; Berlin, the Downfall, London: Penguin Books, 2003.
Daniel Levinson, The Seasons of a Mans Life, New York: Ballantine,
1978.
CWL, 3 [Insight], pp. 28-9.
Ibid, p. 291.
See Kristina Arp, The Bonds of Freedom, Simone de Beauvoirs Existentialist Ethics, Chicago: Open Court, 2001, p. 48.
Francis ]eanson, Sartre and the Problem of Morality, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980, p. 15.
Method, p. 55.
Ibid., p. 37, also p. 31 and p. 33.
CWL, 17 [Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965-1980], p. 400. Method, pp. 105, 115-116.
Ibid., p. 105.
The Way to Nicea, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1976, p. vii.
Ibid., p. 171.
CWL, 17, p. 378.
Ingmar Bergmann, Images, My Life in Film, London: Bloomsbury,
1994. The remark features on the back of the dustcover.
