Lonergan and Historiography: The Epistemological Philosophy of History

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Lonergan and Historiography

e


e The Epistemological Philosophy of History

Thomas J. McPartland

University of Missouri Press

Columbia and London

Copyright © 2010 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5â•… 4â•… 3â•… 2â•… 1â•…â•‡ 14â•… 13â•… 12â•… 11â•… 10 Cataloging-in-Publication data available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-8262-1884-1 This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Design and composition: Kristie Lee Printing and binding: Integrated Book Technology, Inc. Typeface: Palatino

To Faith Smith and Glenn “Chip” Hughes

Contents

Preface Introduction Restoration of the Philosophy of History Chapter 1 Basic Horizon and Historiography

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1

6

Preliminary Sketch “History” as Inquiry The Non-Foundationalist Foundation of the Philosophy of History Basic Horizon: The Ontological Philosophy of History The Epistemological and Speculative Philosophies of History

8 16 17 21 29

Chapter 2 Critique of Historical Reason

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Universal Viewpoint of Hermeneutics Historical Objectivity Interpretation Descriptive, Explanatory, and Narrative History Historical Description and Historical Explanation Historical Theories Historical Writing Evaluative Historiography

38 43 47 54 55 56 62 65

Chapter 3 History of Thought and Praxis

75

Psychohistory Cultural History

81 85

viii

Contents

History of Ideas Intellectual History History of Philosophy

91 97 104

Chapter 4 History of Consciousness

111

114 120 128 136 144

Identifying the Discipline The Age of Myth The Age of Theory The Age of Interiority Methodological and Substantive Considerations

Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

152 157 189 205

Figures Figure 1: Historical Scholarship and Methodological Cooperation

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Preface

Thi s b ook is part of a larger project dealing with Lonergan’s philosophy of history. A much larger work in progress and an earlier published work, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, both deal with what is termed in this book Lonergan’s “ontological philosophy of history,” where the “historically engaged subject” is related to such themes as historicity, hermeneutics, and horizon. But Lonergan’s “engaged subject” is a cognitive subject, and Lonergan’s distinct, if not revolutionary, cognitional theory can establish the basis for a nuanced and compelling examination of a series of strategic issues pertaining to the practice of historical scholarship—both general issues of historical method, knowledge, and objectivity and specific issues in the disciplines of historical scholarship, particularly in the fields of the history of thought. These issues are the focus of this book. The research for the book has a long history, starting as part of doctoral work under the guidance of Dr. Rodney Kilcup. The project was encouraged from the beginning by the late Timothy Fallon. The opportunity to present versions of the text at conference presentations helped considerably in refining the material over the years. I wish to extend thanks to Fred Lawrence for allowing me to give papers for the Lonergan Workshop at Boston and Mainz, Germany, and to Mark Morelli for providing me with a forum for philosophical exchange at the Fallon Lonergan Symposium sponsored by the West Coast Methods Institute. I also wish to express gratitude to Kerry Cronin for help in retrieving a transcription of portions of chapter four from the Lonergan workshop archives and to Kentucky State University for travel funds. I greatly appreciate the support and professionalism of the entire staff of the University of Missouri Press, particularly Claire Willcox, Sara Davis, and Beth Chandler, as well as the encouragement of the former director, Beverly Jarrett. It has been a pleasure to work with them all in what has been truly a collaborative ix

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Preface

enterprise. The dedication is to Faith Smith and Glenn “Chip” Hughes, both of whom showed extraordinary persistence and support for me to bring this material to publication.


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Introduction Restoration of the Philosophy of History

Prior to the writing of history, prior to all interpretations of other minds there is the self-scrutiny of the historian, the self-knowledge of the interpreter. That prior task is my concern.

F o u n d ationa l thinkers are rare and precious (at least if we take that term in its generic meaning and not in the narrow, Cartesian sense criticized by Post-Modern writers). Thinkers who penetrate to the most profound intellectual assumptions of the age, who grapple with them resolutely, and who, in so doing, likewise address, with bold sensitivity, basic and universal philosophical questions (the substantive issues of any age)–these are thinkers who have, perforce, something worthwhile and fundamental to say over a whole range of philosophical topics beyond their primary focus. The spring of their ideas can give rise to many streams, including the philosophy of history, and, within, the philosophy of history, what we can call the epistemological and speculative philosophies of history. “In constructing a ship or a philosophy,” writes the late Bernard Lonergan, “one has to go the whole way; an effort that is in principle incomplete is equivalent to a failure.’’1 This injunction, in fact, is meant to be the hallmark of Lonergan’s own philosophy, which constructs a philosophy of history. With bold but precise strokes he strives to create a philosophy that is avowedly radical, comprehensive, and foundational (in the generic sense). As such, however, it may seem to be at odds with the Zeitgeist of the past century: for in the dominant horizon of the contemporary situation, dissection and analysis have become bywords amid a “heap of broken images”; all “phantoms of certitude” have seemed to become dissolved; eternal ˘

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verities have apparently vanished with the “triumph of becoming”; the radiant beams of reason have seemed to become eclipsed by the stormy clouds of “irrational man’’;2 and the belief in progress has been shattered in bloody world wars, ghastly concentration camps, fanatical terrorist attacks, and the frightening specter of nuclear holocaust. And yet, Lonergan is deeply sensitive to such prominent currents of contemporary thought as phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, post-Newtonian physics, and the methodical exigencies of the Geisteswissenschaften: they nourish the flow of his ideas, and he integrates them into the stream of his philosophy. His philosophy of history is intended to be at once comprehensive and rooted in the concrete consciousness of a concrete person, transcultural and focused on historicity, systematic and capable of indefinite expansion. It seeks to preserve the sacred orientation to mystery, while vigorously regrounding the secular faith in progress. Lonergan’s approach to the philosophy of history would veritably restore the philosophy of history as a genuine philosophical discipline. In the contemporary situation such a restoration is a desideratum. The philosophy of history first arose in the eighteenth century with Vico and Voltaire as a replacement of the old theology of history, whose last grand practitioner was Bossuet. The original impetus to the philosophy of history was to reflect on the global pattern of history as witnessed in such great speculators as Vico, Voltaire, Kant, Hegel, Comte, Schelling, Marx, Freud, Spengler, Toynbee, and Sorokin.3 This speculative brand of the philosophy of history has been challenged by the emergence of academic specialized history in the nineteenth century, by the rejection of rational systemization from the advocates of existentialism and analytic philosophy of language in the twentieth century, and by the assault on “history” itself as a modernist conceit by contemporary Post-Modern thinkers.4 Alternatively, the philosophy of history could be restricted to the more modest task of a commentary on the type and range and status of historical knowledge. But this enterprise was confined by the cage of neo-Kantian methodologies, narrowed by the empiricist criteria of truth, reduced to a kind of linguistic historicism by many analytic philosophers, and devastatingly attacked by the “deconstructions” of Post-Modernism.5 The remaining effort of the philosophy of history in the twentieth century was to focus on history as a constituent of the human way of being (hence Heidegger’s title Being and Time). Post-Modern philosophy has taken Heidegger to the next limit and has deconstructed the “self” and the “human” to join “history” in the graveyard of imperious abstractions.6 Only a foundational enterprise, then, can restore the philosophy of history. We must be clear that Lonergan’s restoration of the philosophy of history does not rest on the

Introduction

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“foundationalism” so decried by the Post-Modern opponents of the conceptualist systems of modernity. Lonergan’s foundational thinking is no more foundationalism than historical thinking is necessarily historicism or scientific thinking is necessarily scientism. Lonergan’s foundational enterprise might be compared in its radical claims to Einstein’s redirecting of modern physics—and arguably his philosophical discoveries might be placed on a par with Einstein’s revolution in physics. Indeed both Einstein and Lonergan were essentially problem solvers. So in 1905 Einstein addressed three problems that had agitated him—the disharmony of electromagnetic equations, the apparent randomness of Brownian motion, and the contradiction between the predictions of classical physics regarding the photoelectric effect and the experimental evidence.7 The results of this problem-solving were the Special Theory of Relativity and an important contribution to Quantum Mechanics with the introduction of the notion of a photon. A generation later, Lonergan would engage in a life-long pursuit of questions regarding the nature of understanding, the relation of understanding to experience, and the distinct criterion for concrete judgments.8 His problem-solving led him to the amazing discovery that, for Aquinas, there was a distinction not only between understanding and “outer words” (oral or written expressions) but also, more significantly, between understanding and “inner words” (concepts).9 This distinction between intelligere and dicere was more than a bombshell in Thomistic studies, for it challenged the most pervasive assumption of modern thought, the “confrontation theory of truth,” the view, prevalent also in most contemporary discussion of the philosophy of history, that the act of knowing essentially entails a confrontation of subject and object. We need not stress too much the obvious: the whole tenor of modern culture had been framed within the Cartesian dualism of subject confronting object. So we witness the ongoing dialectic of Enlightenment, committed loosely to methodological control of objects, and of romanticism, reacting against the Enlightenment in the name of spontaneity, individuality, images, and affects—but obviously purged of objectivity. Whitehead, Heidegger, Lonergan, and Post-Modernists have, along with others, railed against the Cartesian framework. But it is not so easy to escape. Karl Löwith, for example, claims that Heidegger still worked within that framework.10 Arguably, Lonergan has made the most radical break. In his magnum opus, Insight, Lonergan describes his project as a “preliminary, exploratory journey into an unfortunately neglected region.’’ The neglected region is the activity of insight, its conditions, its workings, and its results; and the journey reveals the “basic yet startling unity” that a grasp of insight confers on human inquiry, opinion, and practical affairs.11

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This is his foundation. Refusing to posit an irrevocable bifurcation of subject and object, he shifts attention from horizons as finished products to the cognitive and existential performance that constitutes them in the project of historical life. The foundation of Lonergan’s philosophy of history, then, is not the activity of an abstract being or of a substance or of a transcendental ego; it is not some strange region of the globe to be apprehended by an esoteric metaphysics of knowledge; it is rather the concrete performance of concrete historical persons to be known by personal self-reflection; that is, it is one’s own performance as an actor in the drama of history to be known by an exercise of self-scrutiny. Although Lonergan is known principally for his cognitional theory and his theological methodology, his earliest intellectual ambition was to formulate a modern philosophy of history shorn of progressivist and Marxist biases.12 For various reasons (including his teaching responsibilities and his health), he never addressed this task in a single work. We must, accordingly, look for his reflections on the philosophy of history scattered in various books, articles, and lectures—keeping in mind how they flow from his radical foundations. In Insight, for example, we see his discussion of progress and decline in history, of critical history, and of methodical hermeneutics. In Method in Theology, we notice how he employs technical terms from phenomenologists and historians, deals with the problem of historical objectivity and historical relativism, explores the meaning of historicity, and argues for functional specialization as a reflective appropriation of historicity. As the quotation at the beginning of this Introduction indicates, we are concerned in this book with the foundations for the writing of history. This means we must address such issues as the method of historiography, the relation of descriptive, explanatory, and narrative histories, and the objectivity of judgments, interpretations, and evaluations. To address such issues is to conduct a critique of historical reason, an enterprise first taken up in a concerted way by Dilthey and continued mostly by analytical philosophers. This is the focus of chapter two. If what distinguishes historical disciplines from those of the natural sciences is that the subject matter of the former is largely constituted by human thought in various modes of expression and differentiation amid various complicated links with technological, economic, and political factors—a claim that Lonergan would vigorously affirm—then we must also identify the distinct fields in the history of thought and clarify what are their specific contributions to the history of thought. This is the task of chapter three, where we examine psychohistory, cultural history, intellectual history, history of ideas, and history of philosophy. In chapters two and three, therefore, we explore the

Introduction

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terrain of the epistemological philosophy of history. But it is legitimate for the philosopher of history to speculate on the large-scale trends in the history of thought. We consider this kind of speculative philosophy of history in chapter four under the rubric of the history of consciousness. Before we can explore, however, Lonergan’s epistemological and speculative philosophies of history, we must take seriously his “prior task” of self-knowledge. In fact, that prior task led Lonergan to the rudiments of a philosophy of historical existence. The epistemological philosophy of history is embedded in epistemology, and epistemology, for Lonergan, is embedded in the cognitional practice of the historical knower and the historical communities of knowers, who, operating within a vast and almost bewildering diversity of relative horizons throughout history, are nevertheless subject to the self-transcending norms of basic horizon and its constitutive pastern of inquiry. To these foundational issues we must turn in chapter one, where we can survey Lonergan’s strategic approach to the philosophy of history in order to assess his major contributions to a restored philosophy of history.

Chapter 1 Basic Horizon and Historiography

If o n e were to practice horticulture in a certain garden, one would want to know, for purpose of orientation and in order to bring the proper tools, the kind of garden and the kind of harvest it may be anticipated to yield. And so we may wish to come to a preliminary understanding about the garden of Lonergan’s philosophy of history. Should we expect, for example, to stand, tangled and dazed, amid the luxurious flora of a speculative philosophy of history in the mode of a Hegel? Or should we expect to have to dig beneath the distracting foliage of metaphysical theories and scientific accounts for an ontological philosophy of history, which explores the existential roots of human being in terms of human historicity? Or should we rather expect to make our way methodically along analytically precise rows of modest plants arranged according to the categories of an epistemological and methodological philosophy of history concerned with the status of the human sciences? As the title of this work indicates, we shall be focused on Lonergan’s epistemological and speculative philosophies of history, both of which are germane for the writing of history. We shall need to address a range of strategic questions pertinent to those fields in the philosophy of history. But as we contemplate those questions, we also realize that, if we are to pursue Lonergan’s approach, they are linked to questions in his ontological philosophy of history. Lonergan’s epistemological and speculative philosophies of history are, therefore, embedded in his ontological philosophy of history. Let us survey some strategic questions. If we ponder what is historical method, what are the relations among historical description, historical explanation, and historical narrative, and what is historical objectivity with respect to texts, facts, and values, we raise a series of further, more basic philosophical questions. What is the ˘

Basic Horizon and Historiography

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method of human knowing? What is the difference between description and explanation? What, if anything, constitutes lived history as a drama so as to lend special validity to historical narrative? What is the nature of objectivity? What is sound hermeneutics? What is moral objectivity (if there is such a thing)? What is the possibility of a critical history that would discern both progress and decline? If we further seek what is distinct, respectively, about psychohistory, cultural history, intellectual history, history of ideas, and the history of philosophy—as a propaedeutic for fostering collaboration—we encounter another set of fundamental questions. What is the psyche and what is its relation to the intellect? What is the cultural infrastructure? What is the mode of expression and of understanding of art and literature? What is an intellectual horizon? What is the efficacy of the notion of a Zeitgeist (i.e., is it a mere construct, or is it a metaphysical reality that absorbs the individual thinkers within it)? What is the relation of the creative thinker and the thinkers’ linguistic framework and intellectual tradition? What is the difference between creative thinkers and representative thinkers? What are the dynamic factors that transform intellectual horizons? What is a concept? What is an idea, and can ideas be the subject matter of history? What is the possibility of a genuine history of philosophy without succumbing to relativism or historicism? If we investigate what are the discernible long-term trends in the history of thought and consider whether such trends constitute an axial period of history, we engage, again, foundational philosophical questions. What is consciousness? What is differentiation? What is the nature and validity (if any) of myth? What are realms of meaning and patterns of experience? Does philosophy replace myth? Does modern science replace philosophy? Is a universal viewpoint compatible with historical diversity? In brief, the epistemological and speculative philosophies of history are conditioned by epistemology and by reflections on the history that is written about. Indeed, for Lonergan, epistemology itself is conditioned by cognitional fact, and cognitional fact is a recurrent pattern of historical existence. We shall, accordingly, refer to Lonergan’s broader analysis of history and the related epistemology throughout the text as the occasion warrants. This broader analysis is Lonergan’s horizon analysis. The burden of this chapter is to make explicit in sufficient detail the relevant features of Lonergan’s ontological philosophy of history for our enterprise. As we examine in this chapter Lonergan’s horizon analysis as the framework for his epistemological and speculative philosophies of history, we must keep in mind that entry into Lonergan’s thought can be both treacherous and deceptive. It can be treacherous because of the sophistication

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and complexity of his ideas, which are reflective of the intricacies and differentiations in the subject matter and reflected in the distinctness and precision of his terminology. It can be deceptive because Lonergan is an original thinker, whose approach departs considerably from familiar intellectual paths, and, accordingly, his views may appear too easily to fit into the usual intellectual stereotypes and his profundities too readily reduced to simplicities. We therefore need a preliminary sketch of such key terms and ideas of his as cognitional structure, transcendental precepts, intentionality, horizon, authenticity, and functional specialties to be able to make sense of his horizon analysis. Above all else, for reasons that will be evident in the course of the exposition, we need to be clear on how Lonergan’s term foundations is an operational and dynamic notion opposed to fixed and invariant conceptual contents.

Preliminary Sketch In Verbum, Lonergan claims that Aquinas attempted “to fuse together what to us may seem so disparate: a phenomenology of the subject with a psychology of the soul.”1 In his philosophy of history, Lonergan himself may fuse together what may also appear to be two utterly disparate concerns: the historicity of the “engaged subject” and the epistemology of the “knowing subject.” This bifurcation has become particularly prominent, if not compelling, for many thinkers since Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s phenomenology of the subject. In contrast to Husserl’s notion of a pure transcendental ego, or subject, confronting the contents, or objects, of its consciousness (which was Husserl’s valiant attempt to overcome the reductionist method of nineteenth century positivism and preserve the integrity of the self as more than just the play of physical or social forces), Heidegger exploited the idea of the “life world” (Lebenswelt), a term introduced by the later Husserl. Heidegger argued in Being and Time that the subject was, in fact, already engaged in the “world” prior to scientific knowing, a world luminous with meaning, either permeated by the openness of “care” (Sorge) for being (in the very question of what it means to be) or distorted by thinking and acting “like everyone else.” Still, the world of the subject can never be the world for an isolated subject, for the subject is “being-with-others” and the world is embedded in the historical tradition. So Heidegger departed from the “epistemological turn” of Descartes, Kant, and Husserl (with the subject as a pure cogito or transcendental ego of some sort confronting, as knower, a world of objects), and took the “ontological turn,” where the subject is engaged in the world, precisely as “being-there” (Dasein). As the title Being and Time


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suggests, Heidegger’s philosophy of history was an ontological philosophy of history because it was concerned with human being as engaged in history and constituted by temporality. Epistemological concerns were essentially aimed at a process of knowing that sought, as part of the “world picture” of modern technology, to dominate objects and to treat nature as a “standing reserve” ready at hand for exploitation. We see here two major assumptions: knowledge is confronting, or representing, objects; and the principal interest of such knowledge is domination.2 In one form or another, this “ontological turn” has had enormous influence up to the present, as witnessed, for example, in the work of Charles Taylor.3 To be sure, large currents of Anglo-American philosophy did not adopt Heidegger’s perspective, as they would give an empiricist or pragmatist focus to the epistemological philosophy of history—but this only proves the point about the bifurcation of the two types of philosophy of history. Perhaps an even more radical critique of the epistemological subject was conducted by Derrida.4 This, too, started as a critique of Husserl. Derrida took issue with Husserl’s idea of propositions as constituted by the noetic acts of the pure transcendental ego, such that language is simply the expression of the self-possessed pure subject and discourse is the monoÂ� logical activity of the monadic subject. Indeed, Derrida argued, using semiotic theory, that signs, in fact, do the constituting in their interacting and difference, thus eliminating any need for the subject altogether. Derrida saw Husserl’s phenomenology as the last vestiges of the metaphysics of presence that Heidegger had attacked. But Derrida’s Post-Modern deconstruction also eliminated the historically engaged subject and thus the ontological philosophy of history—with all of the philosophy of history. Lonergan would preserve both an ontological philosophy of history and an epistemological philosophy of history. What we must explore is how he does it. We can gain a clue to his modus operandi by seeing how his critique of Husserl shares many of the concerns of Heidegger and Derrida (and Voegelin) but heads in another direction by focusing on what they neglect, particularly the role of insight and an interpretation of intentionality that follows from proper recognition of insight, its conditions, and its implications. Lonergan claims that Husserl’s phenomenology is—mistakenly —under the sway of the confrontational, and representational, model, rooted in our experience, as animals, of an extroverted “already-out-therenow-real” world: “The vitality of animal extroversion is attenuated from sensible perception to intuition of universals, and from intuition of universals to the more impalpable inspection of formal essences.” Here Lonergan agrees with Voegelin that Husserl has conceived intentionality under the form of sense perception. “In brief,” says Lonergan “phenomenology is a

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highly purified empiricism.”5 Whereas Voegelin, in a move parallel to that of Heidegger, retains the notion of intentionality from Husserl for cognition of things and differentiates “consciousness as intentionality” from “consciousness as participation,” Lonergan develops an entirely new notion of intentionality that breaks radically from the model of extroverted consciousness. Lonergan can thus transpose the subject to concrete, historical living with a concern for participating in being while, at the same time, divorcing a necessary connection between objective cognition and domination of things. In fact, for Lonergan, both cognitional objectivity and moral objectivity are ingredients in authentic lived history. Let us now examine how Lonergan’s notion of intentionality and associated terms fashions the various facets of his philosophy of history. Consider a politician who genuinely wants to figure out the current economic situation, a diplomat who wants to determine the most pressing international challenges, a new general who has been brought to the front to investigate the status of the combat, a buyer who wants to be able to start up the newly purchased electronic device, a traveler who wants to locate the next town, a poet who wants to make sense of a shattering human experience, a mathematician who wants to solve a perplexing equation, a scientist who wants to explain the data taken from new sophisticated instruments, and an historian who wants to see what light new archeological evidence can shed on an ancient civilization. These are all examples—and they can be multiplied infinitely to limitless numbers of individuals and communities throughout history—of the inquiring human spirit. The spirit of inquiry is restricted neither to times and places nor to the organization, or pattern of experiencing. We see human experience addressed in terms of practical concerns (the economy, international relations, a military campaign, use of technology), aesthetic concerns (the poet), theoretical concerns (the mathematician and the scientist), and scholarly concerns (the historian). What unites these diverse cases is that the persons involved are all impelled by questions—challenges, problems, issues, puzzles. None of these questions arise in a vacuum. To appreciate the individual questions we would need more information. We would need to know the previous experiences, insights, judgments, evaluations, and decisions that formed the context for the questions and gave them significance and vitality. We would need to know, in short, the horizon of the questioner. The horizon, as a “concrete synthesis of concrete living,” can be a complicated and dynamic thing, but it is set of meanings and values essentially defined and bounded by the range of meaningful and relevant issues, concerns, and questions. So all inquirers, including scientists and historians, are already engaged in their “worlds” as apprehended through their


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horizons. But we would also need to know the communal horizon (or horizons) in which the individual inquirers dwell. The communal horizon is itself a complicated affair. Its common experiences, understanding, judgments, and commitments are given context, focus, and determination by the range of meaningful and relevant issues, concerns, and questions. But this communal horizon can only exist historically if embodied in technology, institutions, and cultural sedimentations, all of which are expressions of human thought that attain externalization and objectivation. The communal horizon is embodied in an objective order of society. The more complex and differentiated the society, the more complex and differentiated the horizon or horizons (for there can be multiple common horizons in complex and differentiated societies). The individual inquirers, through acculturation, socialization, and education, enter into the communal horizon. So there arises the complicated relationship between individual horizons and communal horizons.6 We see here Lonergan employing the resources of phenomenology and the sociology of knowledge in framing his notion of horizon. But he adds his own contribution by detailing a dynamic, recurrent, and transcultural structure that carries its own immanent norms in a process that is open and self-transcending. So let us return to the inquirers. No matter how much their initial situation is conditioned by their personal and communal horizons and by their historical situations, once they engage in the process of inquiry, they are already on a path of transcendence, for the question is the immanent source of transcendence. The transcendence is never absolute because the human inquirer must always, as an historical being, negotiate the “tension of limitation and transcendence”—but the point here is that there is a process of self-transcendence. And, according to Lonergan, this process is experienced by all who engage in it. The process unfolds spontaneously as a structure with internal norms and a directional tendency (what Lonergan means by “intentionality”). The claims, then, that Lonergan makes about the structure, the norms, and the intentionality are not based on deductions or inferences; they are based primarily on the experience of the process. The claims, therefore, upon which rest the core of Lonergan’s philosophy of history, can be verified, but the verification can only rest, ultimately, on personal reflection. This makes any theoretical account of Lonergan’s claims secondary to the personal reflection. Still, given the nature of the structure, some claims will not be subject to radical revision if, to revise those claims, the reviser needs to perform the very operations being denied in the revision. We can see that Lonergan will employ a performative criterion in his analysis of history.7 Let us outline the self-transcending structure of inquiry with the caution just mentioned

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about the nature of the claims and the caveat that we shall explore further details and implications as the case requires later in this chapter and in subsequent chapters. Spontaneous inquirers, if they are faithful to the spirit of inquiry, are attentive to experience; they address questions from the perspective of their horizon to the data of sense-experience or the data of consciousness (which Lonergan conceives as self-presence in operations and not as an inner look).8 As inquirers wrestle with questions, they are attentive to sensations, percepts, memories, and images. So far, the empiricists are correct about the constitutive role of experience in knowing. This is in accord with the performatist criterion. But the process of inquiry continues when inquirers exercise intelligence and gain insights, which go beyond the images and add an organizing principle that cannot simply be imagined or sensed. A dramatic instance of this is when the geometer grasps the intelligibility of a circle, which goes beyond anything the geometer can see, such as a wheel (for the geometer cannot see points and lines). Insights cannot be adequately developed without some sustaining flow of expression (the expressions might be common-sense aphorisms, artistic creations, or concepts, propositions, theories, and interpretations—depending upon the type of questions). The geometer, for example, will formulate his or her insight into the intelligibility of a circle by the definition of a circle, where the understanding employs the imagination to cover a range of cases.9 Insights are postimaginable and preconceptual because they pivot between images and concepts. This means that insights are both commonplace (who would deny having any?) and elusive. They are elusive because they are not imaginable and they are preconceptual. As a result, their proper role in cognition has been massively neglected in the philosophical tradition, a problem Lonergan, of course, sought to correct in his book Insight. On the one hand, empiricists will try to collapse cognition onto the senseexperience side preceding insight; on the other hand, the rationalist will try to locate cognition on the side of concepts with their logical splendor, universality, and necessity. If insight is elusive, it is nonetheless the font of human creativity and self-transcendence, and its recognition can fuse an ontological philosophy of history with an epistemological philosophy of history because insight is both the “release of the tension of inquiry” by inquirers embedded in historical life and the source of concepts. The content of an insight (or the act of understanding) is an “idea,” and the formulation of an idea is a “concept.”10 Objective knowledge is not the sole preserve of concepts. Concepts are products—historical products—of the process of inquiry.


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So far, we have seen the process of inquiry unfold insofar as inquirers are faithful to the demand to be attentive (to data) and to be intelligent (to gain insights and express or formulate them). No matter how diverse the personal and historical situations, no matter how diverse the questions, no matter how diverse the data, and no matter how diverse the insights and concepts, the demands to be attentive and intelligent are universal and transcultural. Lonergan calls them, accordingly, “transcendental precepts.” We can say that genuine objectivity involves the “authentic subjectivity” of following the transcendental precepts. Underlying all attempts to understand is the basic, or transcendental, intention to understand, which is the spontaneous, conscious, directional tendency of inquiry.11 But the process of inquiry spontaneously heads beyond this. There are more transcendental precepts, and the role of insight is, so to speak, reduplicated twice in the unfolding structure of inquiry. In seeking to understand, inquirers spontaneously asked variations of the question, “what is it?” The next stage of cognition is the spontaneous question, “is it so?” The question regards the adequacy of the formulations of understanding. This is most dramatically revealed in the modern scientist’s efforts at verifying or falsifying a theory (which is a grand formulation of scientific understanding). Here the intention of truth is operative. This demand is present in the politician’s question of whether the current economic theory gives accurate predictions, the foreign minister’s query of whether the current policy toward a certain county accurately reflects the facts on the ground, the inspecting general’s concern on whether the current military strategy is working—and, as we shall see in the next chapter, the historian’s review of whether historical explanations about a civilization based on the archeological data are penetrating. The relevant transcendental precept is to be “reasonable.” If this stage of cognition starts with the products of the earlier stage—the formulations of understanding— and ends with judgment (“yes, the formulations are correct,” or “no, the formulations are not correct,” or “probably so,” or “probably not”), what is between the formulations and the judgment is decisive—namely, insight. Lonergan calls insight at this stage “reflective insight.” It grasps what is sufficient evidence in this case and whether, and to what extent, the evidence is forthcoming in this case. As in the previous stage of cognition, understanding was reduced neither to sensations nor to concepts, but was centered on insight as the pivot between images and concepts; so, in this stage, objective judgment is rooted neither in mere synthesis or coherence of concepts nor in extrinsic appeals, such as the public origin of judgments, but in the activity of insight and the operative criterion of “no

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further relevant questions.”12 Remember, Lonergan would have us test his claim about judgment by appealing to our actual conscious performance in making judgments in order for us to get proper reflective insight into the relevant evidence about his claim. While emphasizing, therefore, personal creativity and the personal source of objective judgments, Lonergan would not see the personal as private and would acknowledge that often, if not ordinarily, inquirers participate in a community of inquiry, either, for example, with other men and women of common sense, or with scientists, or with historians.13 Lonergan further claims that reasonable judgments open up inquirers to truth and reality. We are not related to reality, argues Lonergan, by a look, whether at sensations or at concepts or at essences; we are related to reality by our self-transcending questions. If the meaning of our questions is transcendent (i.e., if we really seek what is the case and not simply what fits into our opinions), then the answers to our questions, terminating in reasonable judgments, are also transcendent.14 And if the primary meaning of “objects” is what we intend in questions, then objects are not modeled on what is sensed (only part of the contents of cognition), as seemed to be the case with Husserl, nor primarily on Cartesian or Kantian things to be manipulated by technological thinking, as was the case for Heidegger. The process of inquiry does not stop with cognition. It moves into deliberation, evaluation, and decision, where the transcendental precept is “be responsible,” and where the directional tendency is the “intention of the good.” Again, insight plays a pivotal role. Spontaneously there arises the question: what is it worthwhile to do with respect to what we know? The question is accompanied by intentional feelings that orient inquirers to what is of value (worthwhile). Analogous to the reflective insights that ground objective judgments of cognition, moral insights ground moral judgments. The insights grasp potential courses of action, based on knowledge of fact and possibility, and relate courses of action to moral priorities. As in the case of objective judgments of cognition, the criterion is the immanent and personal one of no further relevant questions. So, in the case of moral judgment, the criterion is the immanent and personal one of no more further relevant questions (called conscience). And as in the case of cognition, judgments are ordinarily made in the context of a community of inquiry and belief; so, in the case of moral inquiry, judgments are ordinarily made in the context of communal living and historical tradition. Thus Lonergan rejects moral relativism in his transcendental precept of “be responsible” and his transcendental intention of the good, both of which underpin the recurrent, transcultural structure of moral inquiry, while vigorously affirming the historicity of the moral agent.15


15

We must underscore one final point. The spirit of inquiry sketched above—along with its precepts, intentions, levels, and structure—is not of minor significance for the process of history. It is at the heart of human history. Without it, there would be no insight. With no insight, there would be no technology, no social institutions, and no culture. With insight comes the possibility of technical, social, and cultural development, and with developing situations come the possibility of more insights and more expansion—in a word, progress. Of course, there is plenty of evidence that humans are not faithful to the norms of inquiry. This means lack of the insights that could arise on the levels of inquiry concerned with understanding, judging, and deliberating. When oversights become effective, there is decline in the technical, social, and cultural situations, and the decline can become cumulative. So we have operative, in historical life, immanent norms that can differentiate progress and decline. Success or failure in identifying these norms itself plays a role in the drama of historical existence. Following the norms of inquiry constitutes “authenticity”; violating the norms of inquiry involves “inauthenticity.” Claims about the process and structure of inquiry that are consonant with actual performance Lonergan calls “positions,” and claims about the process and structure of inquiry that are not consonant with actual performance Lonergan calls “counterpositions.” A critical history of thought must be able to discern positions and counterpositions.16 We are dealing here with the core of historicity and its relation to historiography. When humans, individually and collectively, act in history, this performance becomes data for interpretations, judgments, and evaluations in the present. And present interpretations, judgments, and evaluations of past performance mediate, in turn, future performance as the interpretations, judgments, and evaluations enter into the fabric of social institutions, including education, and mold culture, including political culture. In what we can call this “dialectic of performance and interpretation”—and Lonergan calls the “dialectic of history”—the presence of counterpositions among the interpretations, judgments, and evaluations can create an operative “existential gap” between authentic human possibility (in terms of faithfulness to the transcendental precepts and the process of progress) and inauthentic interpretation. To the extent that the counterpositions are effective to that extent, the horizon constricts and decline accelerates. Historiography arises as a genuine moment in historical existence when it intervenes as a critical tool to determine accurate interpretations, judgments, and evaluations about the past. It can, therefore, directly or indirectly invite the reversal of counterpositions and invite the development of positions. It can do so in functional collaboration with philosophy and social policy. This

16


is historicity, then, as it operates on the level of what Lonergan calls the “cultural superstructure,” where intellectual culture in its various differentiations and specializations reflects upon and criticizes the more spontaneous and compact level of culture—the “cultural infrastructure.” Lonergan issues a ringing declaration of the crucial role historiography can play in the dialectic of history: There is needed, then, a critique of history before there can be any intelligent direction of history. There is needed an exploration of the movements, the changes, the epochs of a civilization’s genesis, development, and vicissitudes. The opinions and attitudes of the present have to be traced to their origins, and the origins have to be criticized in the light of the dialectic.17

It should be clear from this sketch that the spirit of inquiry is operative in lived history and in historiography, that the key to understanding the spirit of inquiry is self-knowledge, that adequate self-knowledge issues in the notion of a basic horizon of history, and that the exigencies of the basic horizon of history require, under appropriate historical circumstances, the development of critical and objective historiography. Let us now elaborate on these ideas so that we can see how Lonergan’s horizon analysis can expand to support his epistemological and speculative philosophies of history.

“History” as Inquiry The very diversity (and, at the same time, unity) of these types of philosophy of history—speculative, ontological, and epistemological—is contained and reflected in the ambiguity of the English word history. The ambiguity is plainly revealed in the following statement by the scholar of religion and art, Gerandus van der Leeuw: “Not only is prehistory mostly dance history, but dance history is mostly prehistory.”18 Now unless “history” assumes two different meanings in this passage, it would seem impossible for dance history to be equated with prehistory. Upon reflection, it becomes evident that, in the first case, “dance history” means the lived history, the existential history, the history that is written about (if sources will allow), whereas, in the second case, “prehistory” means prior to written history, prior to historiography.19 Exploiting this distinction, then, we can say that speculative and ontological philosophies of history focus on the history that is written about (their approach being more characteristic of Continental thought, the speculative type dominating in the nine-


17

teenth century and the ontological type in the twentieth century), whereas an epistemological and methodological philosophy of history focuses on written history (this approach being more characteristic of Angloâ•‚American thought in the twentieth century). Although Lonergan rejects the viability of a speculative philosophy of history in the classic mode, severely limiting its scope, he deliberately seeks to incorporate, in perhaps a unique manner, both ontological and existential interests as well as epistemological and methodological considerations at the very core of his work. If the ambiguity of the term history suggests the dual elements comprising the subject matter of Lonergan’s philosophy of history and helps us locate the contours of his philosophical horizon, the etymological origin of the term may serve as a clue to assist us in further discerning the shape of that horizon. The word history is derived from the Greek, historia, which means “inquiry.” As first employed by Herodotus, historia differentiates an investigation aimed at discovering what men have done and why they have done it from a mere chronicle of current stories.20 That written history, historiography, is a form of inquiry—marked as it is by research into data, formulation of hypotheses, and judgments supported by available sources—is selfâ•‚evident. But given the derivation of history with its double meaning from historia, we are led to ask whether inquiry in a decisive way is not also constitutive of the history that is written about. How could this be so?

The Non-Foundationalist Foundation of the Philosophy of History In what manner, then, does Lonergan propose to deal with this strategic issue in his philosophy of history? One way that seems to offer promise would be to consider the spirit of inquiry operating in historical research. There seems to be a unique type of “common sense” incarnate in historical inquiry itself. The historian might well insist that such terms as intelligence, freedom, and responsibility must refer to features of the process which are the object of historical investigation (i.e., the history that is written about) because the historian himself or herself must employ these words to describe his or her own scholarly efforts. The historian could affirm, against the claims of historical relativism, a certain “common sense”—a horizon of understanding—as transcending any particular historical horizon inasmuch as he implicitly posits its universal validity in his own work. In the common understanding presupposed in historical inquiry and in the recurrent operations of historical investigation would be found a clue to the solution of the problem of relativism.

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One might be tempted to argue that a universal horizon of history could be ascertained by an extrapolation from the method of historiography to the structure of history: an isomorphism would be posited between the structure of knowing (historiography) and the structure of the known (history). The historian could point to the scientist for support in this procedure. After all, does the scientist not pin ultimate hopes on scientific method, not on particular scientific theories? Does scientific method not imply a certain anticipatory knowledge of the general structure of the world? Lonergan does not doubt the validity of such an approach in the realm of the natural sciences.21 Lonergan derives a scientific worldview of “emergent probability” from the structure of scientific knowing. Nor does Lonergan have any quarrel with a concerted focus on historical method because such focus is, in fact, one of his main interests. But his focus on historical method, in contrast to that of a positivist or a neoâ•‚Kantian, is on method given sense and direction by the concrete historically situated spirit of inquiry and on method made operable because it is rooted in a rich horizon of understanding of human reality.22 It must be concluded that a study simply of the structure of historical knowing would be inadequate in constituting the foundations of critical historiography. Such a treatment would not be sound because the very existence of the structure of historical knowing is itself contingent upon a type of prior knowledge of the structure of history. The historian is not only a spectator and critic in the drama of history; he or she is also an actor. Indeed, only because the historian is an actor can he or she understand it. Hence we can profit from Vico’s insight that human beings can know history in a way that they cannot know nature precisely because they make history. Not only can human beings know history differently than they can know nature; they must know it differently. The methods of history and natural science differ, because the respective objects of the two disciplines differ. Nature is intelligible; history, as a product of human consciousness, is intelligible and intelligent (or biased). Voegelin has stated this elementary verity in classical fashion: “Human society is not merely a fact, or an event, in the external world to be studied by an observer like a natural phenomenon. Though it has externality as one of its important components, it is as a whole a little world, a cosmion, illuminated with meaning from within by the human beings who continuously create and bear it as the mode and condition of their selfâ•‚realization.”23 The historian can know history because he or she participates in it. He or she does not have to arrive at a basic horizon in history by extrapolating from a recurrent structure of historical method. As we shall see, by participating in the constitution of history, by being an historical creature,


19

the historian is aware of its structure; it is operative in his or her own performance. Nor could the historian conduct historical investigations satisfactorily unless he or she had an elementary understanding, no matter how vague, of the basic features of the drama of history.24 This understanding involves reflection on his or her own performance as an actor in history. But such elementary awareness, such elementary selfâ•‚scrutiny prior to the writing of history, is not the same thing as explicit and systematic knowledge, as explicit selfâ•‚scrutiny and selfâ•‚knowledge. The latter is not required to do historical work, but in the measure that historiography seeks the causes of events, the genesis of trends, the breakdown of socieÂ� ties, the development of understanding, the distortion of meaning—in the measure it seeks to be explanatory and evaluative and normative—it must engage in the task of explicit, thematic selfâ•‚scrutiny. Thus Lonergan’s epistemological philosophy of history requires, as its prior ground, an ontological philosophy of history. But simply to say “ontological philosophy of history” is not sufficient. After all, there are many such theories of history. How are we to decide among them? It has been further suggested, then, that the correct access to the ontological philosophy of history would be knowledge of self as an actor in history. In attempting to arrive, however, at an ontological philosophy of history by this route, one must avoid a dilemma similar to that encountered in considering the problem of relativism. On the one hand, if one concentrates on the self by concentrating on the interiority of a selfâ•‚contained subject, or cogito, then one loses the wider dimension of history. On the other hand, if one concentrates on history by concentrating on the social and historical objectivations of subjective processes (i.e., of a self which can be known only indirectly in terms of expressions of inner states, a direct inner look being impossible, and known only in terms of expressions radically communal and historical), then one loses the self—and also the possibility of critique of history. Critique of history is lost in the latter case because critique would be caught in the following vicious circle: critique of history demands a critical history, a critical history demands a critique of historical understanding, a critique of historical understanding demands an ontological philosophy of history, but the ontological philosophy of history is to be based on the very history to be critiqued. Where is the foundation of critique? This way of posing the problem is presented from the framework of the confrontation theory of truth, which Lonergan rejects as a distortion of the true relationship of subject and object. From Lonergan’s perspective, even if one does not and cannot have an inner look at the self, one can still attain knowledge of the self, of interiority, of subjective processes prior to objectivation. But this knowledge of

20


the self, as we have seen in the sketch above, is not knowledge of a selfâ•‚ contained monadic subject cut off from the historical world. The authentic self is a selfâ•‚transcending social being open to a common world as a participant in the drama of history. The horizon of the self has roots deep in the processes of acculturation, socialization, and education. In fact, the roots go so deep and are so intricate that a person can neither fully acknowledge all the presuppositions of his or her tradition nor carry on a complete critique of tradition. There is a dialogical relation between self and tradition and between subject and society. Thus, language, social institutions, and historical tradition also mediate the very knowledge of self. One must recognize linguistic frameworks, social and cultural milieus, and historical situations as existential conditions of interpretation. It would seem to follow that one must also recognize the exigency for critical historiography. But we have yet to discuss the agent of critique. If knowledge of self is conditioned by historical tradition, the condition is, nevertheless, not a total one. If tradition cannot be critiqued per se, it can nevertheless be critiqued on a less grand, but still effective, scale. If the person cannot completely leave behind the historical situation, the person can nevertheless transcend tradition by exposing mistaken beliefs, grasping their assumptions, and tracing their historical origins and implications. If the person cannot exist without society, society nevertheless cannot exist without the creative insight and actions of persons. The person, then, as a transcending being, is the source of creativity in history and the source of critique. It is Lonergan’s position that the data for understanding the history that is written about are found primarily in the conscious operations of persons. And yet the primary data reside, not in any person whatsoever, but in the person one happens to be. To be sure, data are to be found in social and historical objectivations and in the activities of other persons. Still, the point is to comprehend the meaning of the data. All interpretations of other persons, other historical ages, and the present sociocultural environment presuppose the context of the interpreter’s own development because one can make little sense of data on human activities and potentialities unless they are likewise operative, at least in some measure, in one’s own performance. This is to say that the structure of the drama of history must be uncovered in one’s own performance as an actor in history. But on the level of personal performance, the data are not simply given. The structure of selfâ•‚constitution, which is as much normative as factual, must first become operative. Selfâ•‚scrutiny is not just opining about one’s “subjectivity” or “creativity.” It is the selfâ•‚reflection of one whom Aristotle called the spoudaios (mature man). The data for selfâ•‚knowledge are given in


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the performance of a person whose orientation or concern sufficiently incarnates the spirit of inquiry, as outlined above in our preliminary sketch. It is the spirit of inquiry—with its existential orientation and structure— that explores the past, questions the present, and is open to the future. This authenticity is an existential condition of effective selfâ•‚interpretation. Plato, in his famous allegory of the cave, used the expression “conversion” to describe this existential disposition,25 and Lonergan speaks of it in a similar vein. Therefore, “conversion” emerges as the main existential category—the major existential condition of the selfâ•‚knowledge at the heart of Lonergan’s philosophy of history. Personal appropriation through selfâ•‚scrutiny holds a privileged position and priority over historiography. But the priority is not absolute. There is a circle, though not a vicious circle, in the effort of selfâ•‚knowledge—the circle being the complementarity and interaction of “introspection” and historical analysis. Without introspection, there is no ultimate ground of critique. Without historical analysis, introspection is shallow and without direction. Encounter with the past challenges one’s present horizon and sparks the quest for adequate selfâ•‚knowledge. Introspection provides a critical basis for unmasking the illusions of the past and for learning from the achievements of the past. The dialogue between past and present points to future possibilities. In one sense, the theoretical foundations of a critique of historical understanding depend upon a set of judgments. In another, more fundamental sense, the foundations rest on the operations of the person in history. Lonergan challenges one to reflect on one’s own performance in the making of history as the basis for understanding and judging his explication. His work in the philosophy of history is meant to be a call to persons in the scholarly community to authenticity, a call to live up to their scholarly and historical responsibilities.

Basic Horizon: The Ontological Philosophy of History What does selfâ•‚scrutiny reveal about the history that is written about? We have already touched upon certain features of lived history in the preceding sections. There we suggested that lived history is constituted by inquiry, a search and a quest one can flee but not escape; that the search and the quest are the existential search and quest of “everyman”; that the existential inquiry of everyman places him or her in a condition between knowledge and ignorance; that ingredient in inquiry itself are norms; that fidelity and infidelity to these norms form the substance of history as a

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drama with sacred dimensions; and that the drama of history is communal as well as personal. The spirit of inquiry, then, is a basic existential orientation. It is a basic method, a basic structure of knowing and doing that is continually actuated in history, although it is diverse in its manifestations. As such, it defines what David Tracy has called a “basic horizon.”26 For the orientation of one’s consciousness—one’s fundamental concerns, interests, intentions, questions—is decisive in selecting the horizon of what one takes to be real, meaningful, important, valuable. A basic orientation would select a basic horizon, a universal viewpoint. The orientation, with its structure of operations, would be the transcultural base of culture. It would be anteÂ�Â�Â�Â�cedent to any given historically situated questions, any given formulations, concepts, systems, logics, any given judgments, and any given evaluations and decisions. None would exhaust it. Still, it would not exist apart from concrete historical horizons. It would be embedded in historical circumstance, though not determined by it. The orientation and structure of basic horizon would be the core of historical process, and all of its aspects could be tied to the notion of historicity, as opposed to historical relativism. Lonergan’s discussion of basic horizon and human historicity is not intended as dogma. The notion of basic horizon is always open to reÂ� interÂ�pretation. And yet all genuine philosophy is arguably an attempt to understand it. Accurate accounts will differ because they are rooted in different historical contexts, asking different questions and emphasizing different features. But, in Lonergan’s view, basic horizon allows for all the various interpretations. He contends that adequate selfâ•‚knowledge can attain an account of the relations among the elements of the structure of basic horizon that is not radically revisable because the account itself would set forth the very presuppositions of any revision.27 Lonergan’s explication of basic horizon serves as an alternative framework to that of the confrontation theory in the analysis of historical understanding and historical method. He would not characterize the act of historical understanding as involving a confrontation of one horizon (that of people in the past) by another (that of historians in the present). To be sure, Lonergan would not deny that there is a difference between the horizon of the object (the known or the toâ•‚beâ•‚known) and the horizon of the subject (the knower). Were there no difference in historical horizons, there would be no history; there would be only pure sameness. Furthermore, he would not restrict historical difference to merely accidental, peripheral, or tangential changes that would leave the human being intact. Human being is neither an essence to be known as an object in the physical world


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nor the existence of a mere substance. Human being is a project, and what human beings do concerns the very essence of that project. Consequently, for Lonergan, historical transformation and difference is a radical dimension of human being. Paradoxical as it may seem, however, were there only difference, there would be no history, either. Historical knowledge would be precluded. How would the historian understand a horizon in the past that was completely different from his or her own? Perhaps the historian could hope to undergo a type of amnesia with respect to his or her horizon and be somehow “absorbed” into the horizon of the past. Such apparently was the approach of Dilthey. But, as previously mentioned, the mind of the historian is not a blank tablet; it is inescapably tied to past experiences, insights, judgments, and decisions. Even if amnesia with respect to his horizon were desirable for the historian, it would be impossible. Of course, there would remain the alternative of mutilating the horizon of the past to make it “fit” into the context of one’s own horizon. Succinctly stated, if there were only difference, then there would be no intelligible connections among what would be hermetically sealed horizons, and without historical links there would be neither history nor historiography. One would be left with the choice of either recognizing the absurdity of human knowing, human values, and human life itself, or asserting the universal validity of the perspective of one particular historical horizon. But to accept the truth of any one historical horizon, even that of relativism, would necessarily be to deny the truth of all other historical horizons because it would raise one historical horizon to the status of an absolute. On the other hand, to admit even the partial validity of some other historical horizons would be to affirm identity, as well as difference. Lonergan maintains that there is an identity in all historical horizons. He suggests that we probe beneath the ideas, attitudes, sentiments, judgments, and actions of a period and focus on the acts of meaning and decision that constitute its horizon. If we shift attention from the “objective” to the “subjective” pole of historical horizons, we can penetrate to a basic concern, orientation, interest, or existential stance that underpins a recurrent structure of conscious acts or operations. Lonergan identifies this basic concern with the “pure desire to know” (the drive to understand and know reality), which underlies the structure of human knowing, and the “intention to bring about good” (the question about what is worthwhile), which underlies the structure of moral action in human living. The pure desire to know and the intention of the good are two elements of a single basic orientation—the spirit of inquiry—because knowing is a value chosen and moral action is informed by understanding.28

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It is Lonergan’s contention that objectivity properly understood is nothing less than fidelity to the pure desire to know. In his view, objectivity does not mean a correct look at something “out there,” whether concepts, essences, or individual things. For Lonergan, it means faithful exercise of one’s own intelligence and reasonableness. In this sense, then, objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity. The quality of one’s objectivity is contingent upon the quality of one’s attention, insight, and discrimination in judgment. Similarly, moral objectivity is fidelity to the intention of the good. Moral objectivity is not a matter of accurate perception of a system of values “out there,” but is faithfulness to one’s sense of responsibility.29 Statements about values are the formulation of moral insights. Hence, moral understanding does not derive from a look at a system of values but rather from insights achieved through the concern, questioning, and involvement of moral agents. The orientation that Lonergan talks about is an existential stance, a way of living, which selects what we have called a “basic horizon” of operations. These operations, as we have seen in the preliminary sketch above, include acts of questioning, of grasping insights, of judging, of apprehending values, deliberating, and deciding—the operations of the structures of knowing and of moral action. Normativeness arises from the fundamental intentionality of basic horizon; that is to say, norms are immanent in the pure desire to know and the intention of the good. Adherence to the norms of basic horizon generates the structures of knowing and of moral action, whereas violation of the norms makes the structures inoperative or only partially operative. The basic horizon of operations is, therefore, the identity in all different historical horizons, for unless there were a modicum of intelligence and responsibility at work, no human society could be created or be perpetuated. To be inattentive, unintelligent, unreasonable, and irresponsible is to invite decay, corruption, breakdown, disaster, or collapse. Thus, Lonergan argues that following the norms of basic horizon is the source of progress in history and that violating those norms is the cause of decline in history.30 From the perspective of Lonergan’s philosophy of history and human understanding, the historian does not confront a totally alien horizon in his or her investigation. Rather, as Gadamer has suggested, the historian is engaged in a fusion of horizons.31 When the historian is performing intelligently and reasonably, he or she is operating within basic horizon. In such a case, evaluation is not a matter of imposing the ideas and values of one’s world on the ideas, values, and actions of others; it is rather a matter of determining whether or not the ideas, values, and actions in question were in accord with the norms of basic horizon. Were ideas and


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attitudes the fruit of the pure desire to know, or were they products of various forms of bias? Were policies intelligent and reasonable in light of the existing historical situation? Were they responsibly implemented? Such are the types of questions that may be asked. The answers may be difficult to ascertain, but, according to Lonergan’s model of human understanding, they should not be excluded in principle on the grounds that they would not be objective. In fact, evaluative historiography, far from forsaking objectivity, is a true manifestation of it. It must not be assumed, however, that, as an historian, one is securely nestled in one’s own horizon as one makes historical judgments. Through one’s encounter with the past one may discover inadequacies and distortions in one’s own world. One may have to lift one’s own horizon to the level of the horizon that one is examining to properly understand, judge, and evaluate the latter. Or, by uncovering distortions in the past, one may become aware of similar elements in one’s own horizon. In short, evaluative historiography, while it is always undertaken from the standpoint of one relative horizon, is also necessarily an activity within basic horizon. Because it is such an activity, it places in question every determinate historical horizon, including the historian’s. Basic horizon, consequently, is not any particular concrete historical horizon. As an existential stance committed to questioning, understanding intelligently, judging reasonably, and evaluating, deliberating, deciding, and acting morally, it is the identity in all historical horizons. But it is, at the same time, also a fundamental and inexhaustible source of difference in historical horizons. Basic horizon is essentially defined, bounded, and limited by the range of the pure question; it extends as far as does human questioning—questioning that regards both what is and what ought to be. Therefore, no determinate horizon can be equated with basic horizon: no determinate horizon can answer all the questions; no determinate horizon can ask all the questions; and no determinate society can perfectly realize the good. If the project of questioning is taken as being the foundation and meaning of objectivity, and not a set of answers or even a set of formulated questions, then the differences among historical horizons do not, in themselves, imply relativism.32 In Lonergan’s philosophy of history, extreme relativism (emphasis only on the difference in human world views), properly understood, denies human historicity. Human history, in his view, is not simply a process but also a project. At the very least, this project revolves around seeking to understand what it means to be human and striving to implement that understanding. The project, then, is oriented toward a goal—an “ideal.” The wealth and diversity of human ideas, inasmuch as

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they are not a result of bias, distortion, stupidity, and irresponsibility, can be attributed to the fact that the goal is more definite than any concrete historical achievement. If Lonergan’s notion of objectivity is accepted, then the myriad instances of authentic human understanding and acting attain a unity because they are all within the basic horizon of the project of history; they are all intellectually or morally objective. Differences among such historical horizons would not be incompatible. In these cases, differences would arise from different perspectives: either different questions would be posed, the same questions would be posed in different contexts, or the same questions would be answered in compatible though not equally penetrating manners. By the same token, positing a set of eternal truths likewise denies human historicity. Lonergan’s position is that human being is a known unknown; the goal of the project of history is like an x in an algebraic equation.33 What it means to be is known in the sense that it is the “ideal” of historical action; it is the object of the question. What it means to be is unknown in the sense that it is revealed only in the performance of searching for the goal—a performance that never ceases. It is a question and no answers are so definitive as to end the search. Without basic horizon there is no question; without relative horizons there are no answers. Basic horizon cannot exist without relative horizons. Identity cannot exist without difference. Thus, human history consists of the basic orientation of questioning and the answers formulated at particular times and places. The basic orientation does not exist apart from historically situated answers. Lonergan’s philosophy is an attempt to explicate features of basic horizon from the perspective of his relative horizon.34 He would not claim that his inquiries were exhaustive. Nor would he claim that more adequate treatment could not or should not be given. But what he would claim, however, is that his account of the relations among the operations of basic horizon is not radically revisable. Lonergan’s philosophy of history thus embraces both basic horizon and relative horizon. Using the resources of phenomenology and the sociology of knowledge, Lonergan explores the complexity of relative horizons. He sees personal horizons as structurally marked by levels of conscious and intentional operations, ranging from experiential, to intelligent, to reasonable, to existential; by biological, aesthetic, dramatic-intersubjective, religious, mythic, practical, scientific, scholarly, and philosophical patterns of experience; and by corresponding realms of meaning. Thus, the dynamic horizon of the person is constituted through a mutual ongoing relation of performance and interpretation. Although communal perspectives are objectivations of individual horizons, they display their own inner dynamics


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and relationships among technological, economic, political, and cultural levels and serve as the pervasive matrix of individual acculturation, socialization, and education. Alongside these structural elements there is a developmental tendency toward greater differentiation of cognitive and expressive skills in the lives of individuals and in technical, social, and cultural histories.35 Lonergan seems to erect here the kind of scaffolding Dilthey advocated: a sophisticated theory of the dynamic systems of historical interaction. But he goes beyond Dilthey when he claims to penetrate to a normative dimension of lived history.36 Present throughout structural and developmental process is the hermeneutical project of selfinterpretation. This is, of course, because, according to Lonergan, human history is not merely a process but is more a project revolving around the question of what it means to be. And because the project, in its unrestricted sweep, is the search for meaning and the quest for value, human history is a veritable drama of inquiry. The complexity of the interaction of basic horizon and relative horizon in this drama argues definitely against any monocausal or reductionist interpretation of history.37 Certain features of the structure of basic horizon are particularly worth noting or reemphasizing here. Lonergan argues that the pattern of operations of basic horizon can be characterized as the invariant, dynamic, normative structure of human selfâ•‚constitution. There is a structure to human selfâ•‚constitution because there is an intelligible relationship in the set of its operations (of experiencing, understanding, judging, and acting responsibly). This notion of structure parallels Piaget’s idea of “constructionism,” which conceives of structures as transformational systems.38 Nevertheless, this structure should not be interpreted as a reified thing in itself, cut off from its underlying orientation of consciousness. The structure is invariant because it is a recurrent pattern of operations. When the norms of basic horizon are followed, the relations of the elements of the structure are invariant. Yet such invariance is not that of a frozen, eternal system that precludes development of the operations. In fact, the history of consciousness is the history of such development. What it precludes, in Lonergan’s judgment, is the radical revision of the relations of the operations. The structure is dynamic because it is freely constituted and assembled by the striving of historical agents. It is a structure on the move. Its dynamism accounts for the fact that it is the principle of historical change. This dynamism is underpinned by a basic intentionality, a basic orientation of consciousness, a basic exigency that impels cognitive and moral activity of the person and of the community beyond any present realization in the search for truth and in the quest to achieve the good. The structure is

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radically open, and thus it cannot rest in any determinate historical horizon. No concrete horizon can completely express the understanding and goodness demanded by the dynamic structure. Therefore, basic horizon is not one concrete historical horizon amid other historical horizons. Basic horizon is always manifested in relative horizons, and, in that sense, it is the ground of relative horizons. But it always goes beyond any relative horizon. Basic horizon provides the criteria for understanding the intelligible historical relations among relative horizons. It is, then, the source of both diversity and unity in history; or, to borrow a phrase from Hegel, it is identityâ•‚inâ•‚difference. Relative horizons, in this context, should not be confused with relativism. Relative horizons are relative to the perspective of a particular time and place. Insofar as they are manifestations of basic horizon, relative horizons can be considered in terms of what Lonergan calls “perspectivism.”39 Insofar as they are distortions of basic horizon, relative horizons can be considered in terms of “relativism” in the pejorative sense. Finally, the structure is normative because norms are immanent in the very intentionality or concern that is the source of the functioning of the structure. Values and objectivity are intrinsic to the dynamism of the critical spirit from whence come understanding, judgments, and evaluations. There is no appeal outside the orientation of questioning. Following the norms immanent in the pure desire to know and the intention of the good generates the structure. Normativeness, therefore, is not a set of eternal truths imposed extrinsically upon history. Because the structure is freely constituted, its norms can be violated. The violations breed the unintelligent and irresponsible actions, the constriction of freedom, and the disintegration and collapse of societies that transform history into a “bloodied slaughterer’s bench.”40 The violations of its norms are the cause of decline in history and of relativism in its pejorative sense.41 If the norms are violated, then the structure ceases, and with it, in the limit, history. But the structure of basic horizon is not the last word in Lonergan’s ontological philosophy of history. The structure is underpinned by a basic orientation of existence that makes authentic personal and communal life a self-transcending process of openness to the beyond—that is, the unrestricted sweep of questioning is oriented to a reality correlative to its unrestrictedness. And engulfing this orientation is the experience of mystery. Here, Lonergan’s account would oppose any closure of history from predetermined reductionist materialism as it would oppose any closure from an antiquated predetermined teleology. His position is consonant with Bergson’s notion of “finality,” which Lonergan adopts, where finality is an indeterminately directed dynamism towards transcendence.42 Thus,


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Lonergan can agree with Voegelin that human historicity is an in-between at the intersection of time and eternity.

The Epistemological and Speculative Philosophies of History The explication of the structure of basic horizon establishes the foundation for a critical discussion of historical understanding and historical method. Lonergan’s analysis of human historicity as identityâ•‚inâ•‚difference suggests a radical justification of historiography. If, as Lonergan argues, our understanding human being is an intrinsic component of the project of authentic human living, and if that understanding is never final but comes about through interpretation of performance in history, then historiography is not merely a reflection on history but is a movement within history. Indeed, prior to the development (if any) of historiography in a society, that society has an existential history, a precritical interpretation of its own past and of its own performance. Historiography is a refinement of such historical interpretation—a refinement that makes interpretation able to be more critical and to transcend the tradition of one society. Because no relative horizon can be equated with basic horizon, the different perspectives of the past enrich one’s own understanding in the present; literally, they broaden one’s own horizon. Furthermore, because every historical horizon intends meaning both within its own bounds and within the basic horizon of all historical horizons, the significance and implications of past thought and action extend beyond the horizon of the people of the time and beyond the particular framework of the historians of a future time as well. For this reason, each generation must rewrite its history.43 Past performance is not only the basis for present interpretation; present interpretation is the basis for future performance. Therefore, historiography, as present interpretation of past performance, is also an element in future performance in history. Lonergan’s justification for historiography is likewise a justification for critical historiography. Difference in history stems not only from the perspectivism inherent in human historicity but also from the violations of the norms of basic horizon. Consequently, historiography must be evaluative. It must be capable of distinguishing between progress and decline in both thought and action. Lonergan concedes that such a task is a difficult one, but he believes it is a responsibility that historical scholarship must accept.44 Lonergan’s rather extensive exploration of the dynamic structure of understanding and moral action—what he considers the key

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to practicality45 —and of the principal sources of bias and distortion (psychological, social, intellectual, and moral) are meant to elucidate the nature, methods, and scope of evaluative historiography. The possibility and viability of evaluative historiography, it should be recalled, is a central issue for a critique of historical understanding. While advocating evaluative historiography, Lonergan is also aware of the necessity of distinguishing it from other historical specializations. He maintains that an explication of the structure of human selfâ•‚constitution can establish the theoretical foundations for the differentiation of what he calls “functional specialties” in historical scholarship, philosophy, and social policy. In the sense in which it is invariant, the structure of basic horizon is the source of the differentiation of the various methods of inquiry. The ongoing interpretation of past performance, according to Lonergan’s theory of cognition, requires, we should recall, operations of experiencing, understanding, and judging. In concrete practice, certain scholarly disciplines are concerned primarily with ascertaining the data of historical experience and establishing its validity (e.g., archeology); other disciplines are interested in understanding the meaning of texts (exegesis) and other evidence; and still other disciplines are engaged in judging what happened in the past and in determining trends and developments (branches of descriptive and explanatory historiography). These disciplines are complemented by the investigations of the human sciences, which understand routines in human living and judge statistical trends.46 But interpretation of the performance of the past calls for an encounter with the past for evaluative historiography to discern progress and decline in history and make explicit the more implicit value judgments of descriptive historiography. And encounter with the past calls for decision in the present regarding norms—that is, a decision regarding basic horizon. It is the function of philosophy to deal explicitly with the foundational problems of basic horizon, problems of reality, truth, objectivity, meaning, and value.47 Because human historicity, however, being future oriented, does not rest with interpretation of the performance of the past, such interpretation, along with decision about norms, becomes directed toward responsible, reasonable, intelligent, and attentive performance in the future (notice the reverse order from interpretation of past performance). The functional collaboration of specialists promoting future performance entails collaboration of specialists focused on either operations of judging, operations of understanding, or operations of experiencing. Judging of fundamental goals is, for cultural communities, the function of doctrines and, for social institutions, it is the function of social policy; understanding of doctrines


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is the function of systematics, and understanding how to implement social policies is the function of social planning; and persuasively conveying the substance of a cultural tradition is the function of communication, whereas execution of social plans is history in the making, which provides experience for later interpretation. Lonergan, then, sees in the very nature of historicity the basis for a differentiation of historical disciplines, philosophy, and social policy that allows for their integration on the level of methods in a way that preserves the autonomy of the functional specialties. This integration attains significance because, as both Lonergan and Habermas agree, the cooperation of scholarship, the human sciences, and philosophy is crucial for the modern effort at an ongoing critique of meaning. Also of concern for the critique of history, we should remember, is the possibility of synthetic grasp of subject matter. The possibility of collaboration of specialists in such areas as biography, history of technology, social history, and cultural history is dependent upon sophisticated appreciation of the roles that individual persons, technology, social institutions, and culture play in the drama of history. Here, Lonergan’s phenomenology of the subject, his observations of the relation between personal horizons and communal horizons, and his analysis of the structural, functional, and developmental features of technical, social, and cultural factors provide a general critical framework outlining the dynamic interplay among components of historical change. This framework can assist in the methodological integration of areas of historical research. And, combined with both the critical apparatus of evaluative historiography and the history of consciousness (to be discussed below), it can generate idealâ•‚types to guide investigation of longâ•‚term trends covering the terrain of different periods of history. Another major goal of critique of historical understanding would be a clarification of the nature of the history of thought—its crucial significance owing to the fact that human history is principally the product of human thinking. Lonergan’s study of human understanding, its many pretheoretic and theoretic forms, its relation to affectivity, horizonâ•‚boundedness, intentionality and philosophical content, and its developmental tendency contribute to such a clarification. His philosophy of history allows for differentiation of the critical functions of psychohistory, the history of ideas, cultural history, intellectual history, the history of philosophy, and the history of consciousness. The terms for these disciplines are not always those of Lonergan, but his philosophy of history encourages and provides for such a differentiation of fields. The particular critical function of psychohistory is established in the fact that it deals with the conflict of human thinking and human sensitivity and with the creative source of insight in

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the depths of the psyche; that of the history of ideas, in that some questions are recurrent throughout many periods of human history and may dominate an era; that of cultural history, in that it considers the general assumptions of a period as revealed in more compact, pretheoretic thinking (in art, literature, religion, and the culture of the everyday world); that of intellectual history, in that it is concerned with the basic assumptions of a period as manifested in more conceptual thinking (in science, philosophy, scholarship, and theology); that of the history of philosophy, in that basic assumptions are ultimately philosophical; and that of the history of consciousness in that it is interested in decisive transformations of understanding the most basic assumptions. The study of the history of consciousness, it should be noted, focuses on radical transformations of the orientation of consciousness, and thus on radical transformations in the horizons of human selfâ•‚interpretation. In the history of the search for meaning and the quest for value, Lonergan discerns two radical changes, or horizon shifts: the transition from myth to philosophy in the ancient world, and the stress on interiority and historicity in the modern world. The history of thought attains a greater measure of intelligibility in light of these radical horizon shifts, which form the core of the history of consciousness. The history of consciousness should stimulate other historical disciplines to raise new questions and to see historical developments in a wider perspective, thereby enhancing their explanatory and evaluative powers. We can set off the history of consciousness from other disciplines in the history of thought because it alone approaches a speculative philosophy of history, providing a universal interpretive schema of the history that is written about. But it only approaches a speculative philosophy of history in the sense of Hegel or Marx: it claims to offer no more than grandâ•‚scale idealâ•‚types, which are in need of constant refinement by contact with empirical research, and its critical foundation is an ontological philosophy of history based on selfâ•‚scrutiny. If we wish to entertain the possibility of a speculative philosophy of history, in this restricted sense, we must do so only after having established an ontological philosophy of history and undertaken a critique of historical reason. From our present vantage point, what preliminary understanding have we gained about the garden of Lonergan’s philosophy of history? The calendar of our venture in horticulture, it seems, follows a simple pattern: from an ontological philosophy of history to an epistemological and methodological philosophy of history and, in a qualified way, to a speculative philosophy of history. We have learned that the garden itself is located in the tensionâ•‚filled space between the mires of historical relativism and the snares of antihistorical dogmatism.


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The tools we are urged to bring are of the variety of selfâ•‚scrutiny and selfâ•‚appropriation. They should enable us to work our way through, in a fashion parallel to that of phenomenologists, to the salient features of historical horizons so as to discern the conscious operations, structures, and developmental tendencies (both cognitive and existential) of personal horizons; the elements and developmental patterns of communal horizons; and the interrelations between personal and communal horizons. They should also assist us to inquire about the spirit of inquiry, which constitutes the basic horizon of the drama of history, so as to grasp how in its cognitive dimension the spirit of inquiry is the key to epistemology and metaphysics; how in its moral dimension it is the basis of ethics; and how in its existential dimension it is reflected in practical, intellectual, aesthetic, mythic, and religious aspects of human living. And they should permit us to spot the violations of the norms of inquiry so as to identify the fundamental and recurrent forms of bias that distort understanding, curtail responsible action, and spark decline. With these tools in hand we can proceed to cultivate the epistemological and speculative philosophies of history.

Chapter 2 Critique of Historical Reason

L o n e r gan’s horizon analysis illuminates the complex dimensions of the relative horizons that pervade and exhibit the diversity of historical existence; penetrates to a basic horizon operative in the process of inquiry throughout human history; and argues for a critical historiography that would arise from the very exigencies of basic horizon. And it is precisely from the perspective of basic horizon that Lonergan can address the questions of what constitutes critical historiography. As discussed in the previous chapter, Lonergan, using the resources of phenomenology and the sociology of knowledge, explores the complexity of relative horizons. Personal horizons he sees as structurally marked by levels of conscious and intentional operations, ranging from experiential, to intelligent, to reasonable, to existential; by biological, aesthetic, dramatic-intersubjective, religious, mythic, practical, scientific, scholarly, and philosophical patterns of experience; and by corresponding realms of meaning. Thus, the dynamic horizon of the person is constituted through a mutual ongoing relation of performance and interpretation. Although communal perspectives are objectivations of individual horizons, they display their own inner dynamics and relationships among technological, economic, political, and cultural levels and serve as the pervasive matrix of individual acculturation, socialization, and education. Alongside these structural elements is a developmental tendency toward greater differentiation of cognitive and expressive skills in the lives of individuals and in technical, social, and cultural histories.1 Lonergan seems to erect here the kind of scaffolding Dilthey advocated for a critique of historical reason— namely, a sophisticated theory of the dynamic systems of historical interaction. But Lonergan also sees an existential dimension. Present throughout structural and developmental process is the hermeneutical project of self34

Critique of Historical Reason

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interpretation. So, according to Lonergan (in agreement with Heidegger and Voegelin), human history is not so much a process as a project revolving around the question of what it means to be. Because the project, in its unrestricted sweep, is the search for meaning and the quest for value, human history is a drama of inquiry. The complexity of the interaction of basic horizon and relative horizon in this drama argues definitely against any monocausal or reductionist interpretation of history.2 Although Lonergan’s philosophy of history takes up the concern of continent philosophers with historicity as a fundamental constituent of human existence, he adds the crucial notion of a basic horizon. Human historicity operates within the tension of limitation and transcendence in an ongoing dialectic of performance and interpretation. In every human society there is an existential history, the “history that is written about,” the selfinterpretation of that society’s past, and an existential philosophy—the society’s self-interpretation of its purpose in relation to reality. Under certain technological, social, and cultural conditions, historical existence can raise itself to a new level of responsibility where a cultural superstructure arises to effect critical interpretations of the self-interpretations of existential history and existential philosophy. The exigency of critical historiography comes from historical life itself. The exigency is to follow the transcendental precepts of being attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible in meeting the challenges of history. Following this exigency is to operate within basic horizon. When historical circumstances allow, critical historiography can enter the circuit of performance and interpretation and bring objectivity to the encounter with the past and, with it, greater possibility of responsibly directing the future by increasing the operational range of decisions. The ontological philosophy of history, accordingly, passes over into an epistemological philosophy of history. Lonergan sees an academic praxis of functional specialties as meeting this imperative of historical responsibility and reflecting the dynamics of human historicity. Recall from the previous chapter, that the functional specialties are simply differentiations of cognitive activities appropriate to the different cognitive levels of encountering the past and being oriented to the future. When we encounter the past, we experience, understand, judge, and evaluate it. So Lonergan gives technical names to disciplines concentrated on each of these levels: “research” (experiencing the data, such as in archeology and philology), “interpretation” (understanding the materials, documents, texts—“hermeneutics” in the original, scholarly sense), “history” (judging what was moving forward), and “dialectics” (evaluating historical trends and movements and activities). The encounter with the past, culminating in “dialectics,” leads to the exposure of fundamental philosophical differences, which

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are handled by “foundations” (determining, through self-appropriation, philosophical positions on knowledge and reality). This, in turn, is the basis for selecting and affirming “doctrines” (in a cultural community) or “social policy” (in a social and political setting), for developing doctrines in “systematics” or developing social policy in “social planning,” and for directing action by “communications” or by “policy execution.” Although historiography will be at work in the functional specialties orientated to the future, particularly in “doctrines,” “social policy,” and “systematics,” where it may be rewritten in light of “foundations,” our concern in this chapter is on the encounter with the past. It should be obvious that “history” will be our focal point. We examine “interpretation” because it is there that materials are brought to “history” for judgment; and we consider “dialectics” because it is there that historical evaluation becomes an issue. It will be sufficient to note that the functional specialties of “interpretation,” “history,” and “dialectics” are themselves part of a larger collaboration of disciplines, all participants in the process of historicity.3 Nevertheless, critics have asked for almost two centuries, how is it possible to achieve an objective view of the past in itself, to show, in Ranke’s phrase, wie es eigentlich gewesen (what actually happened), unless the historian is able to limit effectively, if not to abolish totally, any intrusion on his or her work from the beliefs, attitudes, ideas, and values within his or her horizon?4 Do value judgments in historiography, whether implicit or explicit, run counter to the ideal of historical objectivity? And if value judgments are unavoidable, does this fact thereby commit us to historical relativism and skepticism? These questions have burned their imprint on the intellectual landscape of the last two centuries during the very period when that landscape has been fragrantly scented with the flowering of scientific historical scholarship. By the mid-nineteenth century scientific historiography had become well established, completing a veritable revolution in historical thinking. Advances during preceding centuries in the auxiliary sciences of diplomatic, chronology, paleography, epigraphy, and lexicography enabled the historian to ascertain the genuineness of documents (external criticism); but it was in the nineteenth century, according to Elmer Barnes, that the method of internal criticism, the determination of the credibility of the authors of sources, was perfected. Although Barthold Niebuhr (1776–1831), who applied the critical methods of philology to the study of ancient Roman history, is often hailed as the creator of modern historiography, it was his successor, Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), who is credited with laying the final foundations for modern historical scholarship. For an increasing number of scholars, scientific history became a model that was


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defined largely in terms of their irrevocable opposition to two prominent movements of historiography in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, they had to contend with the imposing currents of speculative history: the grandiose metaphysical systems of Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling, the positivist theories of Comte, Mill, and Buckle, and the historical materialism of Marx. On the other hand, they had to weather the fierce storms of partisanship, whether of nationalist historiography (e.g., Michelet, Droysen), of political historiography (e.g., Macaulay’s “Whig interpretation,” Northern and Southern viewpoints on the American Civil War), or of religious historiography (e.g., Chateaubriand).5 The proponents of scientific historiography wished to eschew both a priori philosophical constructions and partisan moralizing, which they regarded as serious impediments to historical objectivity. Still, if metaphysical history and partisanship were to be excluded to promote an open historical scholarship, did this mitigate against all evaluative history? Could this stance effectively and definitively rend the connection between history and philosophy? As Carl Becker recognized in the early twentieth century, historians have preconceived ideas, and these ideas modify their writing of history. The historian cannot operate without a horizon or without perspectives of values and assumptions about human nature. Thus W. H. Walsh seems to have drawn the inevitable conclusion in his assertion that “differences between historians are in the last resort differences of philosophies, and whether we can resolve them depends on whether we can resolve philosophical conflicts.”6 Lonergan, like the advocates of scientific scholarship, warns against destroying the proper openness of scientific history “to all relevant data or its proper functions of reaching its results by an appeal to the data.”7 At the same time, as we have seen, he affirms the need for evaluative historiography and for dialectical analysis of conflicting frameworks of historical interpretation, thereby rejecting the contention that operation from within a horizon of preconceptions mutilates historical objectivity and invites relativism and skepticism. He breaks decisively with the positivist and romantic strains that tended to dictate nineteenth-century interpretations of objective historical scholarship. Let us gather together from Lonergan’s various works the threads of his ideas on historical knowledge, on historical objectivity, and on historical method to demonstrate this contention and explore some of its implications. Our knitting of the fabric of Lonergan’s critique of historical reason can proceed in two stages: first, we must tie historical understanding to the universal viewpoint of basic horizon and place historical objectivity within the context of cognitional structure; second, we must examine in depth, and render more thematic, Lonergan’s methodological safeguard of historical objectivity and historical evaluation

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through his functional differentiation of the specialties of “interpretation,” “history,” and “dialectics.” While pursuing this second task, however, we must highlight, as a distinct category, dramatic historical narrative, which has not been accorded sufficient attention by Lonergan.

Universal Viewpoint of Hermeneutics We have already established that, for Lonergan, the historian in the present, with his or her horizon of beliefs, attitudes, sentiments, values, and ideas, does not confront an horizon in the past, with its set of beliefs, attitudes, sentiments, values, and ideas. The historian is not faced with the alternative of either demolishing his or her own perspective so that he or she might gaze objectively at the horizon under investigation or manipulating the past so that it might become relevant for present concerns, interests, and problems. Lonergan, accordingly, denies that there is a “pure present in itself” confronting a “pure past in itself.” The present standpoint is, after all, a product of history, and the past is not known by an empty look, void of all preconceptions. Historical scholarship, therefore, is necessarily a fusion, or combination, of the horizon of the historian and the horizon he or she is studying. Is this not to say that the horizon of the historian is primarily neither the horizon of the present nor the horizon of the past but rather basic horizon?8 For it is only by being attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible that one knows anything at all, including the past. Precisely as the framework for correct interpretation of the past and as the standard of authenticity in the past, basic horizon establishes what Lonergan calls a “universal viewpoint” of hermeneutics. Now the peculiar nature of basic horizon as a transcendental horizon—the transcultural foundation of relative horizons—means that the universal viewpoint will share this peculiar, transcendental characteristic. Rather than being the actual totality of correct interpretations, it is a heuristic anticipation of such a totality of correct interpretations. Rather than being a definitive world history, it sets the a priori conditions for the continual reinterpretation of history: A universal viewpoint is not universal history. It is not a Hegelian dialectic that is complete apart from matters of fact. It is not a Kantian a priori that in itself is determinate and merely awaits imposition upon the raw materials of vicarious experience. It is simply a heuristic structure that contains virtually the various ranges of possible alternatives of interpretations; it can list its own contents only through the stimulus of documents and historical inquiries; it can select between alternatives


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and differentiate its generalities only by appealing to the accepted norms of historical investigation.9

We must proceed to unpack this capsule summary by Lonergan. If we may broadly designate historical analysis as the hermeneutical enterprise of interpreting the meaning of both actions and texts, then we must acknowledge that the first principle of historical interpretation is to begin from the universal viewpoint (this applies to scholarship across the functional specialties of “interpretation,” “history,” and “dialectics”). External sources of interpretation, which are, in the main, spatially ordered marks on paper, parchment, papyrus, or stone, do not simply speak for themselves. Their meaning becomes luminous only in the cognitional activities of the interpreter; the proximate sources of meaning thus lie immanent in the experiences, insights, and judgments of the interpreter.10 The richer, the more developed his or her horizon, the greater will be his ability to understand the meaning of the sources. So Jacques Barzun can commend Lucian’s requirement that a political historian be at least forty years of age and have had experience in public affairs.11 By the same token, must not an intellectual historian be adept at philosophy? In brief, historical objectivity requires enlargement, and not constriction, of the interpreter’s horizon. The requisite expansion of the interpreter’s horizon is an expansion of his or her own experience, understanding, and judging to embrace the “range of possible meanings of documents.” The capacity of the historian to interpret the evidence correctly is indeed contingent upon his or her capacity to envisage the range of possible meanings. Lacking the universal viewpoint, the historian will discover that certain past thoughts and actions will, in principle, stand effectively beyond his or her horizon. The universal viewpoint does not, for example, limit meaning, as would logical positivism, to sensible data or to signs that refer to sensible data.12 It does not restrict possible meaning to the province of any concrete relative horizon, including that of the historian, nor to the confines of any particular set of relative horizons. To envisage the range of possible meanings, of course, is not actually to achieve a knowledge of the totality of meanings; it is instead to operate from a platform that is open to all possible meanings—one that is able, in principle, to grasp all possible meanings because the intentionality of basic horizon, and only the intentionality of basic horizon, is correlative to the full range of meanings that have informed past horizons, inform present horizons, and will inform future horizons. It is recognition of the universal viewpoint that overcomes radical historical skepticism and counteracts relativism, replacing it with the “perspectivism” that

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acknowledges both relative horizons and basic horizon.13 It overcomes the empiricist criterion of meaning and, through its emphasis on judgment as a “virtually unconditioned” (grounded in the reflective insights discussed in the “preliminary sketch” last chapter), it overcomes even the sophisticated idealism of Collingwood, who argues for the reenactment of a thinker’s act of thinking as the precondition for interpretation.14 The universality of the universal viewpoint of hermeneutics notwithstanding, its foundation is personal: the data for the universal viewpoint are the personal experiences of the historian as an actor in the drama of history, and the base of the universal viewpoint is the historian’s “adequate self-knowledge.” The historian is able to envisage the full range of possible meanings of documents because he or she can approximately reproduce, in his or her own experience, the orientations, patterns, structures, and operations of consciousness; this means the historian must be able to approximately reproduce the experiences, insights, judgments, and evaluations of others; herein are the sources of interpretation that reside in the “historiographer himself, . . . in his ability to envisage the protean possibilities of the notion of being, the core of all meaning, which varies in content with the experience, the insights, the judgments, and the habitual orientation of each individual.”15 Implied, therefore, in the notion of the universal viewpoint is a certain degree of awareness, even if not fully theoretical, of its most pervasive features—that is, of the same features formulated in an ontological philosophy of history. The dialectical interplay of performance and interpretation means, of course, that operating within the universal viewpoint carries with it an interpretation of the universal viewpoint, and the more thematic that interpretation, the better for the historian. The universal viewpoint, grounded in the self-appropriation of the historian, is, then, the condition of the possibility of correct historical interpretation, establishing what can be called an “upper blade” of historical interpretation—the antidote against relativism. According to Lonergan, historical interpretation operates like a pair of scissors that consists of an upper blade of generalities pertaining to the elements of human selfconstitution and the corresponding nature of hermeneutics and a lower blade comprising the existing tools of scholarly specialization.16 Both blades are needed for historical analysis to be fruitful. The universal viewpoint anticipates the totality of correct interpretations, while scholars working within specialized disciplines (although informed, at least implicitly, by the universal viewpoint) attain the correct interpretations. The universal viewpoint, then, is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for successful interpretation. The historian must, in principle, be capable of connecting possible meanings to actual documents.


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How does the universal viewpoint guide this process? We can consider three points in this regard. First, because the universal viewpoint is the potential totality of the concrete viewpoints to be known by historians, reflective awareness of the universal viewpoint allows the historian to anticipate the structural features of the history of consciousness—namely, that meaning flows out of the dynamic process of inquiry of concrete persons; that meaning, therefore, arises out of a pattern of experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding; that meaning is understood in the diverse patterns of experience and realms of meaning within which the conscious and intentional operations of the pattern of inquiry take place; and that meaning is conditioned by the concrete technical, social, and cultural situations of concrete communities.17 Second, the universal viewpoint anticipates the dynamics of the history of meaning, placing these structural features within a larger field where horizons are linked to each other in the project of history, a field wherein “the protean notion of being is differentiated by a series of genetically and dialectically related unknowns.”18 When an historian comprehends, through the universal viewpoint, the full range of possible combinations of experience and lack of experience, of insight and lack of insights, of judgments and lack of judgments, of decisions and lack of decisions, he or she encounters viewpoints that exhibit varying blends of positions and counterpositions or varying mixtures of authenticity and inauthenticity. These perspectives—individual and communal—can then be related to each other in an explanatory framework, again along a vast continuum between two extremes: either, at one end, in terms of cumulative insights, progress, development, and greater differentiation; or, at the other end, in terms of cumulative oversights, decline, breakdown, and lesser viewpoints. Thus Lonergan can define the universal viewpoint of hermeneutics as “a potential totality of genetically and dialectically ordered viewpoints.” We should note, in particular—as the foundation for constructing ideal-types of radical horizon shifts in the history of consciousness—that the universal viewpoint displays successive stages of meaning, advancing “from the generic to the specific, from the undifferentiated to the differentiated, from the awkward, the global, the spontaneous, to the expert, the precise, the methodical.”19 Third, the universal viewpoint distinguishes genetic sequences of modes of expression—and this is crucial for hermeneutics because interpreters have access to meanings only through the expressions of meaning, which serve as their data. So correlative to the development of meaning from the obscure and undifferentiated to the clear and distinct will be

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devised appropriate modes of expression to formulate, articulate, and communicate new meanings. The sharp differentiation of levels of expression and the invention of specializations of expression will, however, demand a concomitant development or education of prospective audiences; and “the greater the novelty, the less prepared the audience, the less malleable the previous mode of expression, then the greater will be the initial gap between meaning and expression.”20 Let us illustrate the foregoing points in the case of an interpreter going from possible meanings to the actual meaning of an anonymous ancient Egyptian papyrus. He or she must become cognizant of the cultural horizon of the era when the document originated; in other words, the universal viewpoint envisages not only contents of meaning but also contexts of meaning. The interpreter can narrow the set of possible meanings to be attributed to the author(s) of the ancient Egyptian papyrus by relating the ancient Egyptian intellectual horizon to a period in the history of consciousness in which there is paucity of theoretical analysis and in which myth is the predominant form of expression. An ancient Egyptian myth expresses, in a compact style, meaning that today would require enormous philosophical treatises to handle. Lonergan argues that the historian, precisely through the ability to distinguish and recombine elements in his or her own experiences, will have the capacity to work backwards from contemporary to earlier accumulations of insights, or, conversely, to retrace the steps that have led from the past to the present: If people were shown to find in their own experience elements of meaning, how these elements can be assembled into ancient modes of meaning, why in antiquity the elements were assembled in that manner, then they would find themselves in possession of a very precise tool, they would know it in all its suppositions and implications, they could form for themselves an exact notion and they could check just how well it accounted for the foreign, the strange, archaic things presented by the exegetes.21

The horizon of an ancient Egyptian may well be beyond the relative horizon of a person in the twenty-first century, but the horizon of an ancient Egyptian is not, in principle, beyond the horizon of a twentieth-firstcentury historian operating from the universal viewpoint. Thus we return to the fundamental contention of Lonergan that valid historical interpretation is neither a matter of being completely absorbed into an horizon in the past nor a matter of projecting onto the past the interests and concerns of the relative horizon of the interpreter: it is a matter of a fusion of the


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horizon of the past and the horizon of the present within the universal viewpoint, where horizons in the past can be genetically and dialectically related to each other and to the horizon of the present. Still, it must be recalled that successful application of the upper blade of hermeneutics does not automatically guarantee the correctness of any given interpretation; the scholarly disciplines of the lower blade must be brought into play to judge the adequacy of any hypothetical interpretation in light of the concrete evidence. The universal viewpoint abolishes the specter of relativism, but it does not alter the fact that historical inquiry is an ongoing, often tentative, collaborative venture. That enterprise necessitates a division of labor among specialists, gathering the “best available opinion,” while it aims at successive approximations to correct interpretation.22 And where evidence is insufficient to judge the validity of a hypothesis, a frank confession of ignorance must be forthcoming.23

Historical Objectivity Historical objectivity, for Lonergan, is fidelity to the norms of basic horizon. Creativity and objectivity go together. Historical scholarship is to be identified neither with romantic intuition nor with mechanical technique. Our focus on the global horizon of historical analysis—the universal viewpoint, which contains within it the functional specialties of interpretation, history, and dialectics (and, more broadly, research, doctrines, and systematics)—has shown this.24 The historian must be open to the potential range of meanings (and distortion of meanings) in texts, actions, and institutions; he or she must transcend his or her relative horizon; indeed, the historian may have to challenge his or her own assumptions; and yet he or she can enter the viewpoint of another horizon only through personal experiences, insights, and judgments. Hence objectivity is tied to a fusion of horizons bounded by the universal viewpoint of basic horizon. The fusion of horizons, however, is itself tied to the universal structure of knowing present and operative in each of the various stages of historical method and in their dynamic and functional relation to each other. We have already seen how the cooperative enterprise of “research,” “interpretation,” “history,” and “dialectics,” taken as a whole, duplicates the structure of cognition, with “research” resembling experience, “interpretation” resembling understanding,” history” resembling judgment, and “dialectics” resembling evaluation. Although, in terms of its relation to the other specialties, each functional specialty primarily exemplifies one cognitional activity, each specialty also manifests the full structure of cognition in its own domain

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as it inquires about data (usually presented by a preceding functional specialty), gains insights, and eventually arrives at its own conclusions. Those conclusions can, in turn, serve as data for a succeeding functional specialty. Thus researchers, exegetes, explanatory historians, and evaluative historians all display in their scholarship the pattern of historical objectivity. It will suffice here to clarify the nature of historical objectivity by sketching the complex process of the explanatory historian.25 We shall then be in a position to appreciate more exactly Lonergan’s position on historical objectivity. The historian must first learn the genesis, and determine the credibility, of the information conveyed by such data as monuments, remains, and accounts. This task is a matter of “identifying authors, locating them and their work in time and place, studying the milieu, ascertaining their purposes in writing and their prospective readers, investigating their sources of information and the use they made of them.” The inquiry culminates in a series of statements reflecting insights about the sources marked by judgments of greater or lesser reliability. Although reliable sources yield facts about the past, the facts lie more in the realm of historical experience than in that of historical knowledge, regarding as they do, “the fragments, the bits and pieces, that have caught the attention of diarists, letter writers, chroniclers, newsmen, commentators.”26 Consequently, the facts obtained by critical assessment of documents are themselves data for historical investigation proper, which aims at a “rounded view of what was going forward at a given time.”27 The climb from historical experience to historical understanding follows the path of the self-correcting process of learning: series of questions, insights, surÂ� mises, and images lead to further questions, more accurate selection of relevant evidence, and further insights, resulting in discoveries of historical reality; cumulative series of discoveries complement and correct one another to coalesce eventually into a single view; the developing understanding of data is expressed in historical narratives with increasingly comprehensive treatment of complex themes and topics; the narratives shape further questions and lead to further discoveries; finally, the understanding of historical events may, in turn, raise questions that provoke a revision of the original interpretation of the sources. Historical judgment is rendered when no further relevant questions arise.28 But the subject matter is intricate, rich, exceptionally complex, and incapable of being neatly subsumed under general laws, and new evidence can be discovered or later events can occur that place earlier events in a new perspective, thereby revising, if not always invalidating, previous judgments.29 Historiography is a radical


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instance of the perspectivism of human knowing. The historian must not expect geometrical certitude. The process of historical knowledge, however, does not cease with the judgments of individual historians expressed in narratives and monographs, for their work becomes data to be understood and judged by peers and successors. “Just as historians make an intelligent and discriminating use of their sources,” Lonergan remarks, “so too the professional historical community makes a discriminating use of the works of its own historians.” Critical appreciation of historians is generated by critical book reviews, by comparison and evaluation of historical writings, and by histories of historiography. This critical appreciation creates the framework of presupposed historical knowledge that informs initial historical investigations: “The more history one knows, the more data lie in one’s purview, the more questions one can ask, and the more intelligently one can ask them.”30 Objectivity, then, in the complex, interlocking process of source-analysis, historical explanation of events, and criticism of historical writings is the fruit of attentive inquiry into the data, intelligent grasp of the meaning of the data, reasonable judgment of the correctness of formulations, hypotheses, and interpretations, and authentic response to the value of truth, which guides and controls all cognitional activities. It is not the putative “look out there” posited by the confrontation theory of truth. If “the criterion of objectivity is the ‘obviously out there,’” Lonergan observes, “then there is no objective interpretation whatever; there is only gaping at ordered marks, and the only order is spatial.”31 Lonergan thus rejects the nineteenth century views of empiricists and positivists, based on an analogy with the current theories of natural science, that historical objectivity is simply a matter of describing the historical facts or of ascertaining the facts and their intelligible interconnections (Zusammenhangen).32 He agrees with J. G. Droysen (1808–1884) that facts and interconnections form a single piece, that they constitute historical reality in the fullness of its conditions and the process of its emergence, and that they are products of historical investigation. The facts are not “out there” prior to historical analysis. The historian starts out with data and, if successful, ends up with facts.33 The naive idea, therefore, must be dismissed that the purpose of historical interpretation is the “reconstruction of the cinema of what was done, of the soundtrack of what was said, and even of the Huxleyan ‘feelie’ of the emotions and sentiments of the participants in the drama of the past.”34 Although Lonergan, like Carl Becker and R. G. Collingwood, focuses on the constitutive role of understanding in historical knowing—that is,

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on the constructive activities of the historian—he avoids falling into the trap of accepting an idealist interpretation of history.35 He attacks, for example, Collingwood’s notion that historiography is the reenactment of past mental experience. Lonergan admits that some reenactment in feelings and value-judgments is necessary to interpret what he calls elemental meanings—intersubjective, artistic, symbolic, and incarnate meanings—but he does not admit that there is possible any actual reenactment of another’s understanding and thought.36 Collingwood’s postulate of a reenactment of another’s thought seems to be a carry-over from the romantic ideal of absorption into the horizon of the past. It is true that for me to understand what Plato meant I must be able to grasp the content of Plato’s insights; I must become caught up in the subject matter. But this process entails an understanding of what Plato intended and not a reenactment of Plato’s own act of understanding. While Collingwood adverts to the difference between the thought of the interpreter and that of Plato, he nevertheless also insists on the necessity of a reenactment of Plato’s thought as a means of accounting for the validity of the interpretation of Plato’s meaning. Lonergan, on the other hand, grounds the validity of knowledge of the meaning of an author, not in an idealist reenactment of the author’s thought, but in the act of judgment, whereby one reasonably determines whether the conditions required for a correct interpretation—conditions grasped by reflective insight—are fulfilled in the evidence. Judgment is rendered, then, not by a reenactment or reproduction of all the details of an author’s thought, but by the absence of any further relevant questions.37 His emphasis on the distinct and constitutive nature of historical judgment allows Lonergan to refute the claim that the historian is locked inside his or her own mind confronting immanent contents of his or her own, perhaps private, understanding. As we should recall from our discussion of Lonergan’s cognitional theory in the “preliminary sketch” in the last chapter, it is a misconception to regard the mind either as the “merely subjective” mental processes of a concrete person or, in neo-Kantian terms, as the logical a priori conditions of knowing appearances, or, in the postmodernist theory, as imprisoned in the structure of language that effectively eliminates both the subject and the objective world of history.38 The human mind is intentionally oriented to “what is” (to reality); and to know “what is,” it engages in the operations of understanding and judging. Hence the historian can truly know the past, but historical knowing, precisely as the product of intelligence and reasonableness on the part of the historian, is not the result of a look at the facts “already out there.” If the criterion of objectivity is fidelity to the norms of basic horizon (operating within the universal viewpoint), then does it not follow that


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fidelity to the intention of the good can issue in an objective judgment of value? And does it not also follow that historical evaluation is not in itself incompatible with historical objectivity? Evaluative historiography, in this case, would not be an intrusion of mere subjectivity on the objectivity of historical method. The historical investigator would, in principle, be just as capable of making objective judgments of value about the past as he or she would be capable of making objective judgments of fact about the past. Neither Lonergan’s explication of the universal viewpoint of hermeneutics, nor his position on objectivity, we must conclude, assails the project of a critical encounter with the past. Even so, how can the openness of scientific history be scrupulously safeguarded against metaphysical constructions and partisanship? The objectivity of judgments of value does seem more easily contaminated in this regard. This is a genuine and pressing methodological concern, which must be faced without succumbing to positivism. If the problem is methodological—and not epistemological, for evaluation can be objective and true—then the solution must likewise be methodological. More detailed observation of Lonergan’s division of historical scholarship into the functional specialties dealing with texts, causal connections, and historical evaluation will not only illuminate his methodological solution, but also shed further light on the complex nature of historical understanding and on the scope of historical method.

Interpretation Academic praxis is essentially a raising of the self-interpretation found at the core of existential history to a thematic, critical, deliberate, reflective, and evaluative peak. The discipline of hermeneutics is intrinsically related to the hermeneutical nature of human existence because the norms of inquiry, within the dialectic of performance and interpretation, demand that, under auspicious conditions, self-interpretation climb to the heights of the cultural superstructure. Gadamer, one of the most perceptive students of hermeneutics, recognizes just this when he speaks of “effective-historical consciousness,” which is “primarily consciousness of the hermeneutical situation,” as indeed being the power behind the scientific enterprise of hermeneutics. Effective-historical consciousness, he points out, “determines in advance what seems to us worth inquiring about and what will appear as an object of investigation. . . .” Nevertheless, Gadamer does not conclude that effective history should be “developed as a new independent discipline ancillary to the human sciences.”39 Gadamer’s notion of hermeneutics includes, in a compact form, what

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Lonergan methodologically differentiates in his functional specialties; Lonergan wishes to preserve the dimensions of hermeneutics and historicity in the totality and dynamic interconnections of his functional specialties; and if one were to compare Lonergan to such hermeneutical philosophers as Gadamer, it is with this in mind that one must do so. Lonergan’s functional specialty of “interpretation,” therefore, does not pretend to be the full scope of hermeneutical reflection. His rationale for so differentiating the tasks of academic praxis within the universal viewpoint in such a careful manner is precisely to foster the critical thinking that is part and parcel of historicity on the level of the cultural superstructure. His demarcation of “interpretation” as the distinct specialty of exegesis enables him to meet head on, with his characteristic sensitivity to nuance, the challenge of the subject–object problematic, which has plagued much of modern historical thought. Does every text require interpretation? Although Lonergan denies that this is the case for very systematic works, perhaps it would be more in line with his position to suggest that some interpretation, even if minor, is necessary to understand the full meaning of texts, with the amount of interpretation required being a variable, depending upon the kind of text. Would not Euclid’s Elements, for example, stand in need of some interpretation, however negligible, in light of modern developments in non-Euclidean geometry, which spell out his unacknowledged assumptions?40 To ask why these assumptions were unacknowledged would demand a certain historical awareness of the paradigms operative in Hellenistic geometry. Clearly, the more systematic the text, the less the exegesis that is necessary. The least exegesis will generally be found in works of mathematics and science, whereas the most exegesis will be associated with the world of common sense, which differs markedly from place to place and from epoch to epoch, particularly with those common-sense expressions that have intersubjective, artistic, and symbolic components.41 Philosophy, it would seem, straddles somewhere between scientific and common-sense expressions—its parameters perhaps being indicated by Spinoza’s treatises and Heraclitus’ aphorisms. Philosophical writings address themselves to the intellectual range of prospective audiences;42 they are, we may add, usually concerned with issues of universal import (though most frequently as these issues impinge on specific problems of the age in which the author has lived); and they are written by thinkers who live in an intellectual milieu nurtured by fundamental assumptions that, although they can be objectified, are often not explicitly formulated because they are taken for granted. We can explain the process of exegesis first by elaborating on points made about the universal viewpoint.


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The texts, then, will not simply speak for themselves. Interpretation needs an interpreter, and the quality of interpretation is in direct proportion to the quality of an interpreter’s horizon. Thus, “the wider the interpreter’s experience, the deeper and fuller the development of his understanding, the better balanced his judgment, the greater the likelihood that he will discover just what the author meant.”43 The richer and broader his or her horizon, the greater will be the capacity to envisage the range of possible meanings and the more proficient the interpreter will be in carrying out the exegetical task. In a similar view, Gadamer argues that interpretation of a past horizon must include “application” of its meaning to the present horizon.44 On the other hand, the confrontation theory of truth with its “Principle of the Empty Head,” as Lonergan calls it, asserts that such philosophers as Plato, Aquinas, and Kant must be left to speak for themselves with no subjective interference from the horizon of the interpreter. This is both confused and futile: None the less, Plato and Aquinas and Kant keep speaking for themselves each in several widely different manners when they are allowed to do so by different interpreters. Nor is this surprising, for they are long dead, and their speaking for themselves is just a metaphor. . . . The proximate sources of every interpretation are immanent in the interpreter, and there is nothing to be gained by clouding the fact or obscuring the issue.45

The proximate sources of meaning lie in the interpreter’s own experience, understanding, and judging.46 Unless the interpreter can understand the object to which the text refers, he or she is incapable of grasping the meaning of the text. Unless, for example, he or she has insights into the dynamics of the self, he or she cannot understand most Platonic dialogues. Without insights into the structure of political institutions, he or she cannot understand Aristotle’s discussion of constitutions. Lacking spiritual sensitivity, he or she cannot understand the mystical writings of John of the Cross. Thus, the interpreter is not merely concerned with the immanent content of the author’s act of consciousness; indeed (save in those circumstances when the author is caught in the grip of bias), correct interpretation is theoretically possible only because the original author and the interpreter both operate within the universal viewpoint: because both are animated by the intention of truth. Now the primary goal of the exegete is to ascertain the objects—real or imaginary—intended by the author of the text, neither to evaluate nor to develop the author’s ideas; it is the goal of the scholar in the functional specialty of “dialectics” to evaluate the author’s understanding of the objects; and it is the goal of the thinker in

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the functional specialty of “systematics” to further the understanding of the objects themselves.47 An encounter with works of impenetrable depth and amazing richness —works that deserve to be named classics—is a striking illustration of the fusion of horizons, whether by the exegete, dialectical analyst, or systematic thinker. Such works are challenging, inexhaustible sources of questions that invite the interpreter into ever fuller exploration of the subject matter, so much so that, without the classics in any given field, an investigation in that area would be like a ship adrift in a wild sea having lost its trusty and venerable navigator. The fact that the proximate sources of meaning are immanent within the interpreter, then, does not abrogate the mediating role of the past and of tradition. The interpreter, of course, must bring himself or herself into the encounter, but he or she thereby risks his or her horizon—and opens himself or herself up to the possibility of self-transcendence. To understand the classics in letters, philosophy, religion, and theology, the interpreter may have to undergo the radical transformation of horizon Lonergan terms a “conversion,” demanding a more profound self-knowledge; the interpreter may have to lift his horizon up to the level of that of the author of the text, for an existential condition for understanding the ideas of a thinker of the caliber of a Plato or an Aquinas is that the interpreter must initially reach up to the mind of Plato or Aquinas.48 Still, is this ever a finished task? Lonergan quotes Schlegel’s description of a classic: “A classic is a writing that is never fully understood. But those that are educated and educate themselves must always want to learn more from it.” Here is dramatically revealed the historicity of truth. The classics, Lonergan argues, “ground a tradition, creating the milieu in which they are studied and producing in the reader through the cultural tradition the mentality, the Vorvestandis, from which they will be read, studied, interpreted.”49 To wrestle with the meaning of an author, two demands must be met (see Figure 1). First, the interpreter must have agility in traversing the paths of the universal viewpoint. The greater the exegete’s ability to envisage the total range of possible meanings, “the greater the likelihood that he will be able to enumerate all possible interpretations and assign to each its proper measure of probability.” Moreover, as we have seen above, a hypothetical formulation of the content of an author must be supplemented by a hypothetical formulation of the historical context of the author.50 What was the intellectual situation at the time of the author? What resources of expression were available to the author? The interpreter must be on the outlook for genetic and dialectical movements. All of this, we must add,


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may be implicit, because it is probable that few interpreters will render thematic their operations from the universal viewpoint. Second, the interpreter’s formulations must be based on an understanding of the actual intent of the author. Here a host of issues intrude. Is the personal life of the author known? What were the author’s motives and questions? Were there changes, alterations, and transformations in the author’s viewpoint? Were there shifts in interest and discontinuities? The statements of a writer are not necessarily part of an all-encompassing, logically coherent, and consistent system. Lonergan cautions that the dynamism of life and of intelligence cannot be equated with the viewpoint of an electronic computer.51 An intelligent writer advances in insight as he writes; early insights may be incipient and underdeveloped; later, fresh insights may be so crucial and fundamental that previous work may have to be rewritten; in addition, an initial gap may appear between discoveries and the treasury of images and words that can adequately communicate them, reflecting the tension between meaning and its expressions, which is “grounded in dynamic constellations of the writer’s psyche”; at the same time, an author may purposively write from a moving viewpoint, anticipating that a reader might increase in insight as he or she reads. Where an expected intelligibility is absent, an inverse insight may be required to understand a text, particularly where meaning is subjected to the stress and strain of bias.52 And what are the myriad factors surrounding the origin, production, and survival of documents? An unverifiable host of accidents can enter into the decisions that led to their production, into the circumstances under which they were composed, into the arbitrariness that governs their survival. Much that is obscure, ambiguous, unexplained, would be illuminated were it not for the lamented hand of destructive time, were we more familiar with former modes of compilation and composition, were our information on authors and origins more complete.53

These two sequences are tied together through the self-correcting process of learning by which the interpreter determines whether his or her hypothetical understanding of the object of the text squares with the author’s actual intent. By a gradual accumulation of insights, a scholar comes to appreciate what the author “would say and what he would do in any of the situations that commonly arose in his place and time.” Essentially the exegete’s manner of investigation must reflect the nature of the construction of the text itself; that is, it must reflect that the text is an expression of

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meaning, that the meaning is constituted by the author’s concrete intentions, purposes, concerns, interests, and questions, that the author’s questions are posed in the context of the author’s horizon, and that the author’s horizon is embedded within the larger context of a cultural milieu and an historical epoch. As one learns about the author and the text, “one discovers more and more the questions that concerned the author, the issues that confronted him, the problems he was trying to solve, the material and methodological resources at his disposal for solving them. So one comes to set aside one’s own initial interests and concerns, to share those of the author, to reconstruct the context of his thought and speech.”54 There is, then, a hermeneutical circle in interpretation, a circle that encompasses the author’s sentences, paragraphs, chapters, opus, entire corpus, horizon, communal horizon, and historical situation. But, given the hermeneutical event of a fusion of horizons, the circle expands to also embrace the interpreter’s own capacity to understand the object to which the text refers, his or her ability to envisage the range of possible meanings, of possible intellectual contexts, and of possible resources of expression in the history of consciousness. The hermeneutical circle is bounded by the universal viewpoint. One surmounts the circle—or, perhaps more accurately, one works within the circle—by acquiring insights through the selfcorrecting process of learning, whereby one gradually transcends one’s own Fragestellung and enters the multiple, connected, though limited, contexts of an author. A context in this sense Lonergan defines simply as an “interweaving of questions and answers in limited groups.”55 A set of interwoven questions and answers is, so to speak, like a distinct garment worn by an author. It is, however, only one part of the entire costume; and the author’s choice of garb is affected by the fashion of the contemporary community and the tastes of the age. Distinct contexts of interlocking questions and answers are therefore related to each other because an author’s acts of meaning presuppose a background of personal ideals, of previous experiences, insights, judgments, and decisions, of communal assumptions, and of historical tendencies. Does this not take us beyond the functional specialty of “interpretation”? If the hermeneutical circle points to an expanding cluster of contexts beyond the author to the problems of the historical period and beyond the author’s intent to the objects themselves, the limited and distinct nature of the contexts nevertheless guard against the swamp of relativism, permitting an exegete to render judgments about a particular author or about a particular topic within the functional specialty of “interpretation.” Indeed, it is Lonergan’s position on the objectivity of judgment as a constitutive element in knowing (in contrast to the more restricted Kantian conceptualist


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framework apparently accepted by Paul Ricoeur) that allows him to emphasize both the meaning of a text itself (as does Ricoeur) and the intent of the author without, in the latter case, succumbing to a romantic hermeneutic (the bugbear of Ricoeur).56 The criterion of judgment is whether or not an interpreter’s insights “meet all the relevant questions so that there are no further questions that can lead to further insights and so complement, qualify, correct the insights already possessed.” An author’s complex multiplicity of insights can stand within a “higher limited unity” on a single topic that can be differentiated from his or her opera omnia and from the Zeitgeist; such a limited context enables the interpreter to pronounce his or her interpretation “as possible, highly probable, in some respects, perhaps, certain.”57 To be sure, there is a link between the “higher limited unity” of a particular topic and the central core of an author’s horizon. So the issue becomes how relevant to understanding an author’s treatment of any particular topic it is to understand the author’s treatment of other fundamental topics within the author’s horizon. What can resolve the issue? Only the self-correcting process of learning. It is the contextual and limited quality of such judgments that grounds interpretation as a viable functional specialty. Although the interpreter, for example, must have knowledge of the historical situation of an author, this information is required only inasmuch as it sheds light on the author’s motives, concerns, questions, and resources in handling a certain range of problems. The exegete, qua exegete, must consider the material of the historian—or of the dialectical analyst, or of the systematic thinker—only to the extent that such materials are pertinent to discovering the meaning of the author. To be sure, the exegete must utilize the tools and resources provided by the other functional specialties; this is imperative, after all, because the specialties are functionally related to each other as participants of a cooperative venture. The imperative applies not only to the endeavor of understanding a text but also to the project of communicating the meaning of the text. When addressing himself or herself to colleagues in notes, in articles, in monographs, and in commentaries, the interpreter must put to full use the instruments of researchers: grammars, lexicons, comparative linguistics, maps, chronologies, handbooks, bibliographies, and encyclopedias. But when communicating to an audience of scholars in other fields, Lonergan urges, more than a basically descriptive attempt is needed to convey an impression of the “foreign, the strange, the archaic,” which in such portrayals as those of the Hebrew mind, Hellenism, and the spirit of Scholasticism, can unfortunately become for most readers “mere occult entities.” An explanatory approach is needed that is conversant, to some degree, with how patterns of experience and elements of meaning can be

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assembled at various times and places, ranging on a scale in the history of consciousness from compactness to differentiation.58 Dialogue with an explanatory history of consciousness is needed.

Descriptive, Explanatory, and Narrative History If the explication of Lonergan’s functional specialty of interpretation is a rather straightforward affair, a consideration of his functional specialty of history is a more complicated matter, which requires more careful piecing together of the fabric of his thinking and indeed the introduction of new patterns into that fabric. The study of history could not proceed unless it were supplied with the data garnered by interpretation of documents, monuments, and remains. Interpretation opens up access to the self-interpretation of the individual actors in the drama of history and to the self-understanding of whole peoples. Still, the drama includes more than simply the interpreted roles of individual actors and even the intentions of groups. The functional specialty of “history” is fundamentally interested in the drama as it results through the interplay of the characters, their insights and biases, ideas and decisions, actions and interactions, achievements and failures. History is preeminently concerned with what is “going forward” at particular times and places among particular groups; by covering a wide scale of operations in dynamic process, it examines origination of routines and departure from previous routines, development and decline, collapse and recovery.59 Lonergan employs a military analogy to distinguish the field of hermeneutics (what people meant) from the field of history (what was going forward): History is concerned, not just with the opposing commanders’ plans of the battle, not just with the experiences of the battle had by each soldier and officer, but with the actual course of the battle as the resultant of conflicting plans now successfully and now unsuccessfully executed.60

The military analogy suggests that just as participants in a battle are unaware of the course of the battle, let alone of its outcome, so the participants in the drama of history usually are not fully cognizant of what is happening nor capable of predicting what will transpire in the future. The destiny of a people is not played out merely as the sum total of the wills of the individual actors. Lonergan offers four reasons for concluding that historiography has the task of determining what, in most cases, contemporaries do not know:


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1. Experience is individual, while the data for history lie in the experience of many. 2. The actual course of events results not only from what people intend but also from their oversights, mistakes, failures to act. 3. History does not predict what will happen but reaches its conclusions from what has happened. 4. History is not merely a matter of gathering and testing all available evidence, but also involves a number of interlocking discoveries that bring to light the significant issues and operative factors.61

Historical Description and Historical Explanation If the course historiography must chart is neither that of a positivist bare description of the gathered facts “out there,” which apparently can speak for themselves, nor a testing of the evidence along the lines of the physical sciences, what, then, is the nature of historical description and of historical explanation? What are their respective roles? How are they related? And how are they both connected to the writing of historical narratives? Let us turn to Lonergan’s differentiation of basic history, special history, and general history for a clue. Basic history “tells where (places, territories) and when (dates, periods) who (persons, peoples) did what (public life, external acts), to enjoy what success, suffer what reverses, exert what influence.” Special histories focus on “movements whether cultural (language, art, literature, religion), institutional (family, mores, society, education, state, law, church, sect, economy, technology), or doctrinal (mathematics, natural sciences, human sciences, philosophy, history, theology).” Can we not infer that basic history is largely a descriptive enterprise of identifying what happened in the past, locating, as it does, “the more easily recognized and acknowledged features of human activities in their geographical distribution and temporal succession”?62 But over and above descriptive history there is explanatory history, which assesses why things happened in the past. And do not the special histories contain such an explanatory element as they seek to establish the causal connections among events?63 The descriptive and explanatory components, however, cannot be separated, their difference rather being one of emphasis, and perhaps it is to this that Lonergan is alluding when he mentions yet a third kind of history, general history, the ideal of a total historical view, which is a combination of basic history illuminated and completed by special histories.64 To know what happened, one must grasp the relations among historical events, and to know why events happened one must be aware of the events themselves. Lonergan thus agrees with Droysen that “facts and interconnections form

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a single piece, a garment without seam.”65 To put it another way, one cannot separate knowledge of an historical event from knowledge of its historical significance. Indeed, Lonergan insists, following Droysen, that historical events “stand revealed in their proper reality” only through a fourfold grasp of meaning and significance: “So historical interpretation moves toward historical reality, grasping the series of events, first in their inner connections, next in their dependence on the situation, thirdly, in light of the character or psychology of the agents, and finally as a realization of purposes and ideals.”66 Does this not imply that the descriptive component in historiography is not an end in itself but is instead a means to the end of ascertaining causal connections?67 This postulate seems in accord with Lonergan’s cognitional theory, which states that understanding being is a grasp of intelligible relations, with a primacy bestowed upon explanatory relations. Historical understanding, too, as Lonergan asserts, apprehends intelligible patterns in the data. And what is the heuristic ideal of this historical scholarship? It is nothing less than relating to one another, and not to the manifold relative horizons of interpreters and audiences, “the contents and contexts of the totality of documents and interpretations.”68 The thesis of perspectivism, of course, means that the pure explanatory account is an ideal that can only be approximated because the universal viewpoint of the historian is not a separate horizon above the historical concreteness of particular relative horizons. Given the widespread current debate over the topic of historical explanation, it is important to stress exactly what Lonergan means by historical explanation. Rejecting the laws of the natural sciences as the model of historical explanation, he considers it in terms of the expression of the ever-developing, common-sense type of understanding. The causes that historians investigate must be understood in the ordinary language meaning of “because.”69 The historian operates under the presumption that certain common-sense regularities in the present also apply to the past; but he or she must always be ready to wave the analogy in the face of evidence of dissimilarity; he or she must be able, through further concrete insights, to transcend his or her own presuppositions and enter into the alien perspective, the common-sense horizon, of the era under scrutiny.70

Historical Theories The historian, however, is assisted in his exercise of this sophisticated extension of common-sense explanation by timely recourse to theories. Properly validated scientific and philosophical theories, Lonergan argues,


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can broaden historical knowledge and facilitate its development, although they do not, in themselves, constitute historical knowledge.71 They do not constitute historical knowledge because their target is the universal and the recurrent whereas historical analysis aims at the particular and the unique; the uniqueness of an historical event is not the numerical or material uniqueness of a particular thing whose intelligibility can be governed by a general law, but is the uniqueness of a particular, qualitatively distinct event in a drama whose meaning is constituted by, and constitutes, the actors. The role, then, of theory in historical explanation is essentially to provide heuristic guidelines that must be supplemented by concrete, common-sense insights. It can lead inquiry in fruitful directions, thereby aiding historical understanding. It also can support historical judgments. The chain of causation, which embraces the unique interaction of relevant geographical, biological, psychological, technological, economic, political, cultural, and personal elements at particular times and places, is potentially indefinite; it cannot be readily subsumed under any general laws.72 But the historian has the burden of estimating the most relevant and significant causes, and to execute this task to the maximum degree, his or her judgment must be informed not only by flexible common-sense rules of historical experience but also by appropriate theories. We may draw our attention at this point to four kinds of theories Lonergan discusses, each of them with its own distinct contribution to make to thoughtful historical investigation. First, those human sciences modeled after the methods of the natural sciences deal with the unconscious side of human life, a side not at least partly constituted by meaning and value.73 Here historians can take note of how biological, psychological, geographical, demographic, and certain economic factors, which are frequently amenable to statistical analysis, limit the operational range of human freedom—both individual and collective. Second, other human sciences examine repetition and universal patterns of change in the world of meaning, studying the origin, development, and collapse of routines of speech and action.74 Lonergan’s position on the relation between this type of human science and historical scholarship, as we have seen, would seem to parallel Max Weber’s distinction between the scientist’s configurational analysis of structures of meaning and the historian’s situational analysis of particular and unique events that leave history an open process. For Weber, the configuration of the scientist is, in itself, merely a model—an ideal-type that cannot account for historical reality. Referring to Weber and, at greater length, to HenriIrenee Marrou, Lonergan argues that an ideal-type is neither a description

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of reality nor a hypothesis about reality. It is, in his words, “a theoretical construct in which possible events are intelligibly related to constitute an internally coherent system.”75 An ideal-type, such as Fustel de Coulanges’ conception of the ancient city-state, is a particularly rarified theory with a definite and legitimate intellectual mission. Coulanges did not select what was common to all or even most instances of the ancient city, but he concentrated on the most favorable instances, those that offered the greatest intelligibility and explanatory power. Lonergan agrees with Marrou that an ideal-type can serve an extremely useful heuristic purpose, even when the actual situation diverges considerably from its conditions, for it can bring to light precise differences that would otherwise go unnoticed and it can pose questions that would otherwise go unasked. At the same time, ideal-types clearly must be employed with circumspection, lest they be confused with descriptions of reality and reduce history to an abstract scheme.76 Perhaps most theories of the human sciences conform to the mode of an ideal-type and thus present to historians all of its benefits and all of its drawbacks. Third, these same benefits and drawbacks are witnessed on a more grandiose scale in speculative philosophies of history. Unlike the idealtypes of the human sciences, the historical constructions of such classical speculators as Vico, Marx, and Freud issue proclamations about the actual course of events. If subjected to adequate scientific and philosophical criticism, Lonergan insists, such theories can, in fact, possess the utility of grand-scale ideal-types. Yet their danger is obvious: by putting into high relief certain aspects of history and certain associations, they may correspondingly neglect others of equal or greater importance.77 The farthest Lonergan himself penetrates into the dense territory of a speculative philosophy of history, as we shall examine in chapter 4, is in his discussion of the historical movement from compact to differentiated consciousness, a modest excursion as speculative theories of history go. Lonergan’s version of the history of consciousness, partly grounded in the explanatory upper blade of the universal viewpoint, is informed by an ideal-type of “exceptional foundational reality,” which exploits the real transcultural developmental tendency of the human mind. Indeed, its very status as a pure ideal-type may be questionable because its roots lie in transcendental method; and, as the norms of the universal viewpoint dictate, the history of consciousness is also grounded in the procedures of specialized scholarly disciplines, which tie the theory of developmental sequences to concrete evidence. Moreover, the history of consciousness is an ongoing, collaborative task, describing and explaining actual events in light of


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developmental theory and modifying the theory in light of the description and explanation.78 Fourth, Lonergan’s ontological philosophy of history is more than just a grand-scale ideal-type; it is a model of historical process that is also a description of the operations and structures of actual historical existence.79 The ontological philosophy of history keeps the field of historical inquiry open, indicates the full range of historical methods, and suggests the variety of forms of historiography. Historical scholarship, a sophisticated extension of common sense, can fall prey to the narrowness and shortsightedness of common sense, blinding it to the whole panoply of relevant historical factors. Speculative philosophies of history can act as “big anti-comprehension machines,” to quote Marrou, fostering monocausal interpretations of what is a pluralist field of causal associations.80 Methodologies, rooted in philosophical counterpositions (claims in performative contradiction with cognitive and ethical practice), can support a reductionist and monocausal approach, whether environmental, economic, psychological, sociological, political, intellectual, or theological. Historical reality is nuanced, and it is necessary to be able to focus on particular components of historical change; but when the focus is carried to an extreme, it conjures up abstractions, in the pejorative sense of the term, that obscure historical reality in its multifaceted dimensions. By painting the broad historical picture in bold but careful strokes—a gigantic heuristic image— the ontological philosophy of history can serve as an antidote against these limitations and totalitarian temptations of common sense, speculative theories, and methodologies. Its portrait of the constellations of historical life, their distinct qualities, and their interpenetration points to correlative methods of historical inquiry, their distinct ends, and their cooperative interpenetration. It will suffice to summarize briefly the major conclusions of Lonergan’s ontological philosophy of history relevant to this concern. Lonergan sees the person as the ultimate source of meaning and volition in history. It is not a collective mind that questions, gains insights, and judges. It is not a collective will that deliberates, decides, and acts freely. There is no group entity or substance existing in itself above and beyond individuals, as idealists and essentialists allege. The person is not reduced to a mere function of the technical, social, or cultural milieu. There are indeed “great men” who exert epoch-making influence on history, such persons, for instance, as the philosophers, sages, and prophets who created what Jaspers and Mumford have named the Axial Period of History. The original genius, Lonergan maintains, fashions new linguistic expression, molding culture.81

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Lonergan, however, sustains a balanced view of historical causation by tempering the Great Man theory of history with a frank recognition that social, cultural, and historical circumstances are presuppositions for individual thought and action. Persons—even geniuses—undergo socialization, acculturation, and education. There are no persons in the abstract. The genius does not operate in a vacuum; he or she profits from the human cooperation that supports vital cultural institutions, and he or she ordinarily relies on the largely unnoticed conscientious work of nongeniuses. “For the genius,” Lonergan observes, “is simply the man at the level of his time, when the time is ripe for a new orientation or a sweeping reorganization.”82 Thus the relation of individual and community is a dynamic, complex, and even dialectic one (in the sense of “linked but opposed principles of change,”83 both of which must be respected in the ongoing negotiation of historical living). The communal reality is more than the sum total of its individuals’ ideas and deeds. It is precisely the horizon, organization, and pattern of what is common to many individuals. It has its own distinct historical life that persists over time (though not apart from individuals); and its historical destiny is a linking of successive situations by a set of decisions that is greater than the sum of the individual wills of its participants.84 Individuals cooperating together constitute the nucleus of the community, and the perduring communal life, in turn, becomes the objective historical situation in which individuals are born, reared through socialization and acculturation, and nourished by education. This circuit, alluded to in the “preliminary sketch” in chapter 1, is the dialectic of subjects creating community and community creating subjects. The community, too, with its technological, economic, political, and cultural dimensions, has its own dynamic configuration of relationships. So the technological situation limits, but does not fix, the range of viable alternatives for economic development. Similarly, the economic situation limits, but does not assign the exact form to, the polity. Finally, the technological, economic, and political situations—the state of technological advance, of economic capacity, and of political commitment—limit, but do not determine, the contents of culture; they challenge culture either to legitimate or to respond critically to social institutions. Doubtlessly, it would be the height of folly to conceive of these factors as constellations of things, which move essentially as do forces studied by the natural sciences. To be sure, technology, economy, polity, and culture— along with personal freedom—are themselves conditioned by, though not reduced to, the play of biological, geographical, demographical, and phys-


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iological factors.86 The crucial distinction is that the technical, economic, political, and cultural situations at any given time and place have meanings as intrinsic components and that the meanings are carried by persons within the complicated matrix of a common world. When the meanings change—when sentiments and attitudes, ideas and concepts, judgments and evaluations change—then historical reality is transformed. Moreover, this same human zone of meaning and value can, through its techniques, institutions, and ideas, transform the very landscape of nature—the physical, biological, ecological, and psychic settings in which its mysterious drama unfolds. The world of changing human meaning is at the center of the drama of history because the human drama is the search for meaning and the quest for value. This world is itself polymorphous, as human understanding winds its way back and forth through the aesthetic, practical, dramaticintersubjective, philosophic, scholarly, scientific, mythic, and religious patterns of experience, their different manners of proceeding, and their corresponding realms of meaning. No more than can personal existence be reduced to a mere effect of communal structure, nor communal life to one sole element (whether technological, economic, political, or cultural), nor thought and volition to the level of nonconscious processes, can human understanding be reduced to the mode of one particular pattern of experience as its paradigm and standard. Human freedom, it should be evident, is not absolute. Its range is duly restricted by biological, geographical, demographical, and psychological conditions. It is constrained by the limits of technical, social, and cultural attainment. It is mediated by the products, results, and experiences of past performance as they either weigh upon or lift up the direction of present interpretation. And it encounters the mystery of sacred presence.86 But the drama of history is nevertheless a story of human freedom. Historical inevitability is challenged by fidelity to the desire to know, to the intention of the good, and to the love of the divine, which place in question every limited framework, milieu, and horizon. The story of freedom is, in part, the story of the heroic struggle against the formidable hosts of bias, of oversight, and of moral impotence, perpetually threatening to engulf persons, technology, society, and culture in the perilous flames of decline. Now although the historian is not likely to advert to a theory of progress and decline, he or she implicitly must utilize such a notion when explaining historical movements. This includes appreciating the interlocking of questions and insights. The historian cannot completely ignore the practical insights behind technological inventions

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and economic development. He or she cannot reasonably divorce political astuteness from the acumen to size up the concrete situation and from responsible implementation of policies. And he or she cannot adequately comprehend works of art, scholarly tomes, philosophical treatises, and scientific theories without recourse to their engendering insights and questions. By the same token, the historian cannot explain the smoldering ruins of social wreckage without mention of such destructive agents as neurosis, individual egoism, group prejudice, common-sense shortsightedness, and ideological rationalization. Nor can the historian adequately explain the sometimes muddied paths of intellectual history without recognition of failures to pursue promising questions, of blatant contradictions, of underÂ�developed ideas, of obvious mistaken judgments, and of narrowness of view. Lonergan’s ontological philosophy of history, we can judge, lays the foundations for a more sophisticated version of what Dilthey attempted— namely, a critique of historical reason. Through detailed attention to the intricate patterns of historical life, it establishes the integrity of the various particular fields of historical inquiry, locating, as we have just done, their legitimate regions of expertise, and simultaneously promotes their informed collaboration. Areas of historical study are related, as are individual and community, technology, economy, polity, and culture, and the various patterns of experience.

Historical Writing In addition to the cooperation of different disciplines in the investigation of historical data, the program of collaboration entails a number of distinct types of historical writing; and, we can suggest, there is involved a genuine, if generally unacknowledged, hierarchy of goals, with each type of historiography having its value within the overall scheme. This leads us to consider four major observations to be drawn implicitly from Lonergan’s ideas about the types of historiography. First, as previously discussed, descriptive accounts and explanatory accounts—the latter frequently tied to scientific and speculative theories— complement each other. Neither is found in a pure state, and although explanation may be the more ultimate goal, description has its proper role in the enterprise. Second, the many-sided facets of historical reality necessarily demand corresponding specializations, which will, accordingly, generate a pluralism of works covering the fields of biography, culture, society, politics, economics, technology, and demography; in addition, certain fields will


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stress defined periods and particular peoples, nations, states, and civilizations. Yet, third, the specialized histories presumably are meant to contribute to a more comprehensive view—greater in both extent and depth. The wider perspective is what Lonergan calls general history. This kind of history, Lonergan admits, remains an idea.87 But is this not exactly the point to be hammered home, that it is the ideal, or a principal ideal, of the historical community? General histories are notoriously provisional, controversially selective, that is to say, not merely descriptive catalogues of facts but explanatory discussions of the significant facts—hence elaborate interpretations prone to speculation—and enormously challenging because of the sheer amount of evidence involved. It is easy to criticize the faults of a general history from the specialist’s perspective. It is easier to see the trees than the forest, particularly when the forest is surrounded by the mist of the mystery of existence. Yet, if there is a forest, it could only be labeled obscurantism to stand in the way of the attempt to understand it, however tentatively and partially. Fidelity to the desire to know, it would seem, calls for general histories as much as for specialized histories. But why can we even talk of a forest? What is it that constitutes the unity of history? In chapter 1, we identified the answer as inquiry, which unfolds as the search for meaning, the quest for value, and the response to sacred presence. It is inquiry that defines the transcendental horizon of historical action. It is inquiry that makes of history a drama. Fourth, then, over and above descriptive historiography and over and above specialized explanatory histories, there is not only the larger dimension of extent—the general history—but also a larger dimension of depth (over and above the other kinds of historiography because it encompasses, enriches, and adds to them what it extracts from their depths). If history is a drama, then must not historiography, or one kind of historiography, convey precisely that sense of drama? Must there not be a kind of narrative history that is a dramatic narrative of events, which, at its best, cuts to the existential core of history with great artistic sensitivity?88 Here, style and content would merge, for the drama of history can only be apprehended and communicated through precisely the combination of a type of artistic, psychological sensitivity to the drama of the human condition and the artistic talent to convey the additional, dramatic insights that issue from that sensitivity. Dramatic history must be based on the more scientific achievements of basic, special, and general histories, and it must at every step be justified by rigorous appeal to the evidence. This is unlike historical novels, which can add fictitious events to established facts, though the best historical novels do so with a keen flare for the historical context. It would

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apply to biography, to special histories of peoples, of civilizations, of religions, of intellectual movements, and of political struggles, and to general histories.89 Such a form of historiography has a decisive role to play in the educational task of cosmopolis.90 Still, it need not be, in all cases, evaluative history. It need not aim at handing out praise or blame, but could be content with explaining what happened, albeit in a dramatic style that would admittedly seem on the threshold of evaluation. Its dramatic narration, furthermore, could be expressed in a manifold of forms. Hayden White, for instance, drawing upon Northrop Frye, identifies four major dramatic styles associated with leading historical writers of the nineteenth century: Romantic (Michelet), Tragic (Tocqueville), Comic (Ranke), and Satirical (Burckhardt).91 The variety of forms manifests the individual character of the writing of dramatic narrative. Whereas descriptive and explanatory histories represent more the collective nature of the historical endeavor, dramatic narrative, at its best, requires the effort of a single synthesizing mind weaving together the interconnections of historical facts with an artistic hand. The enduring classics of historiography cannot be the products of technique but are the rare fusion of historical insight and artistry. By introducing the category of dramatic narrative to join Lonergan’s categories of basic history, special history, and general history, we are now in a position to outline the successive stages in the functional specialty of history (see figure 1). We can suggest that it has three distinct stages, with the second stage itself having three subdivisions: first, there is the critical assessment of sources; second, the scholarly analysis of the sources describes what happened in a rudimentary fashion (basic history), explains what happened (special history), and determines what happened in a more sophisticated manner than basic history and on a more comprehensive scale than special histories (general history); and, third, there is the artful presentation of historical materials in dramatic narrative, with respect to either basic history, special history, or general history.92 Each phase in the process, including the subdivisions of the second stage, is mediated by the earlier phases, an absolutely crucial factor in preserving objectivity at each step. Historians for the past century and a half have accepted unquestionably the idea that historical objectivity must be founded upon critical assessment of sources, but they have stumbled confusedly over the complementary relations of description and explanation, no doubt because most of them are strangers to the forbidding terrain of epistemology. These same epistemological obfuscations may reinforce their doubts about the viability of general history, which often appears to be too metaphysical or too preposterous an undertaking. But would not the objections lose much of their


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punch if, informed by an adequate account of explanation and of the role of ideal-types, historians were to conceive of general history as an ongoing task directly mediated by specialized studies? Finally, in the measure that historians prescribe dry pedantry as the criterion of objectivity, they will be dubious about the merits of dramatic narrative.93 But here again mediation comes to the rescue, for the mediation of dramatic narrative by basic, specialized, and general histories counters the legitimate fears of subjectivism. Indeed, in practice, good historical narratives and good biographies—and they are not necessarily evaluative—characteristically tend to be dramatic in tone, as we should expect. What is needed in historiography today is neither the elimination of scholarly analysis nor the proscription of dramatic narratives, but the adornment of the previous accomplishments of scientific history in the rich garb of such classic stylists as Macaulay and Ranke.94 The functional specialty of “history” must be broad enough to incorporate in its domain description and explanation, specialized studies and general accounts, monographs and narratives. The more successful it is in realizing the full measure of its task, the more substantial will be the foundation for historical evaluation.

Evaluative Historiography Lonergan is sketchy about many of the details of the functional specialty of “dialectics.” We are faced here with the task of resolutely following his leads from the general principles he provides and of offering concrete examples of the kind of historiography he has in mind. We must put two layers of flesh on the skeleton of this functional specialty: first, evaluative history and, second, what we can term, in this context, dialectical analysis. Evaluative history encounters, appreciates, and criticizes the past revealed by descriptive and explanatory history, adding judgments of values to judgments of facts as it discerns good and evil. Similarly, evaluative hermeneutics encounters, appreciates, and criticizes the meanings of authors unraveled by interpreters. Evaluative history and evaluative hermeneutics, then, pose the further questions beyond those concerned with understanding and facts, the questions for deliberation and evaluation; it is in this sense that they are said by Lonergan to assemble and complete the work of the functional specialties of research, interpretation, and history (see figure 1).95 They acknowledge the values persons represent, deprecate their shortcomings, scrutinize their intellectual, moral, and religious assumptions, pick out significant figures, compare their basic views, apprehend processes of development and aberration. They assess the merit of philosophical, ethical, and religious positions, chart the “origins

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and turning points, the flower and decadence” of intellectual and spiritual communities. They trace the impact, for good or for evil, of philosophical or of ideological assumptions on ruling elites and popular culture, on social and political movements. They evaluate the tradition that forms the mind of the interpreter, the historian, or the human scientist.96 We have already considered how, for Lonergan, a moral judgment can, in principle, be objective. Just as objective judgment of fact is grounded in reflective insights, so objective judgment of value is grounded in moral insights. Moral judgment is the fruit of a complex process in which one is open to the full scale of values and their hierarchy (vital, social, cultural, personal, religious), in which one attends to the concrete situation—its moral possibilities and demands—bringing to bear all of one’s store of relevant knowledge, and in which one weighs long-term and short-term consequences. In brief, the criterion of moral objectivity is fidelity to the intention of the good (the question of what I ought to do)—not a look at moral truths “out there.” The good that one intends is always concrete, and the method one utilizes to reach it is the self-correcting process of moral learning.97 Can we not conclude that evaluative historiography is a spontaneous extension of the self-correcting process of moral learning? It is a common-sense procedure of carrying one’s own moral sensitivity and wisdom—and one’s moral blindness and folly—into the problems, perspectives, and circumstances of another age. It requires the utmost in empathy for the self-interpretation of the actors involved, their difficulties, and their limits. It must resist smug satisfaction in judging others. It will invariably have to reflect upon one’s own moral finitude. It may find one’s own moral horizon at risk. It must learn to cultivate a keen appreciation of the arduous road that moral life must travel. Perhaps the term “moral” is too narrow and misleading, suggesting mores, conventions, reified codes, and overly sentimental moralizing. Evaluative historiography (and evaluative hermeneutics and evaluative human science), we must emphasize, is concerned quite simply with fidelity and infidelity to the transcendental precepts of being attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible, and loving. This is the very substance of the struggle of existence in the drama of history. Evaluative historiography, we should expect, will be dramatic par excellence: it will be, as Lonergan notes, history in the style of Jacob Burckhardt.98 In most evaluative histories, especially those dealing with social and political events, interest will focus on whether or not people acted rightly on the right ideas. Here the quality of decision will be of paramount importance. Here will be exhibited the marvel of progress supported by cumulative insights and the glorious expansion of human freedom. But here will also be displayed the malady of decline,


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as the body politic is racked by the tortures of neurosis, individual egoism, group bias, and ideology, usually inflicted as part of the debilitating existential cycle of dread of self-transcendence, flight into divertissements and concupiscence, and recourse to ressentiment.99 In the case of intellectual matters, on the other hand, the value at stake for evaluative history is principally the value of truth. We may suggest, however, that as philosophy has both its existential component and its systematic component, so evaluative intellectual history has both an incarnational aspect as well as a cognitive aspect to contemplate. Surely the striving of a thinker for truth manifests what Lonergan calls incarnate meaning, and it is incumbent, in particular, upon intellectual biography to capture the personal fidelity and passionate devotion, the patient frustration and rapturous delight, that mark the serious play of the life of the mind. But cognitive truth is what intellectuals are striving for, and hence the evaluative historian legitimately enters the arena to contest the rectitude or falsity of the contents of ideas (although with the proviso that the ideas must be interpreted as ones historically circumscribed by a concrete process of question and answer). Unlike explanatory intellectual history, evaluative intellectual history critically engages the subject matter, encounters the past, and takes sides more openly. The criterion of objectivity in evaluative intellectual history is fidelity to the intention of truth. This is philosophic history in the style of Ernst Cassirer, R. G. Collingwood, and Eric Voegelin: careful, penetrating, often breathtaking, and serious.100 Evaluative historiography, we may assume, may be most effective when it makes its points through insinuation rather than by direct statement. Although Thucydides, for example, renders few explicit judgments of value, his juxtaposition of Pericles’ funeral oration, the plague of Athens, the Melian Dialogue, and the Sicilian disaster perhaps distinguishes The Peloponnesian War as one of the more potent and compelling works of evaluative historiography ever written. Can not dramatic narration, precisely by its arrangement of themes, its focus on certain topics, and its linkage of prominent thinkers, all in such a manner as to highlight the challenge of possibility, also assume the form of what Kierkegaard called “indirect communication” to become a powerful invitation to philosophical reflection?101 It could thereby artistically raise the foundational questions of philosophy—questions that can only be explored, dealt with, and resolved in the inner sanctum where is waged the mighty struggle of personal selfappropriation. Lonergan believes that there is a more methodical path heading in the same direction. Beyond evaluative historiography is a kind of evaluative analysis of the past, involving six stages (see figure 1). First, investigators

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compare horizons, doctrines, systems, or policies in the past as described, explained, and evaluated by historians to seek out affinities and oppositions. Second, they reduce contrary viewpoints to root differences. Third, they classify those oppositions that result from irreconcilable, fundamental philosophical differences. Fourth, they select for exclusive focus those oppositions grounded in dialectically opposed horizons. Fifth, they identify what they consider to be the correct philosophical positions—compatible with authentic intellectual, moral, and religious life—and the incorrect counterpositions. And sixth, they “develop” the positions and “reverse” the counterpositions. The last stage strives for a reassessment of history, to present “an idealized version of the past, something better than was the reality.” In intellectual history, for instance, this would entail further pursuing the trail of insights, suggestions, and clues while correcting the oversights. The obvious risk in this enterprise, on the other hand, is that investigators with muddled philosophical horizons will portray the past as worse than it really was, walking steadily in the blind alleys of inept ideas and policies and demolishing the royal roads of insightful ideas and policies.102 A number of questions interpose themselves at this juncture. What is the primary goal of the dialectical analysis, in contradistinction to the evaluative historiography? Why does the analysis follow, and not precede, the historiography? Can it, too, mediate an historical narrative? Presumably, there is a range of ways to incorporate both narrative and philosophical analysis in a single work. Maurice Mandelbaum’s History, Man and Reason provides one case of a skilled combination of evaluative intellectual history and critical dialectical analysis.103 Examining the topics of “historicism,” “the malleability of man,” and the “limits of reason” in nineteenth-century European thought, he initially presents an historical treatment, both explanatory and evaluative in tone, of each topic, emphasizing the ideas of representative thinkers, and then concludes each section with a critical appraisal. Given, then, the possibility of the mutual enrichment of evaluative historiography and critical dialectical analysis, even within the scope of a single study, the question still persists: why does Lonergan stress that critical dialectical analysis be mediated by evaluative historiography? Although Lonergan seems to give no clear answer, we can infer the following. Evaluative historiography is definitely intended to be built directly on top of explanatory historiography; the former indeed encounters, appreciates, and even criticizes the past, but it does so, nonetheless, with a decided concentration on engaging actual events and ideas precisely as part of the drama of the past. Holding attention to the fact of conflict in the past, it does not devote the same energy to a rationale


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for its own value-judgments. Dialectical analysis, on the other hand, is more explicit about the grounds of evaluation; it goes “beyond the fact to the reasons for conflict.” It shows diversity and confrontation in the past only to trace the roots ultimately to dialectically opposed horizons, and later it takes its own stand on which horizons are positions and which are counterpositions, in the process reassessing the past.104 This is a step closer to philosophy. But it is only a step. The main aim of dialectical analysis is not so much to prove or to refute a philosophical stance as to establish a comprehensive viewpoint, “some single base or some single set of related bases from which it can proceed to an understanding of the character, the oppositions, and the relations of the many viewpoints exhibited. . . .”105 Evaluative historiography is fundamentally bound up with its encounter of the past, whereas the subsequent dialectical analysis begins to direct focus on philosophical issues crucial to the present horizons of the investigators themselves. This process of objectification of the investigators’ horizons intensifies when dialectical analysis reduplicates itself by criticism of the critics. It regards, as material to be assembled and evaluated, its own dialectical analysis and the works of evaluative historians, interpreters, and social scientists. It compares, reduces, classifies, and selects their basic assumptions and irreconcilable differences. It improves and corrects their criticisms. Such dialectical analysis might, for example, examine the diametrically opposed evaluations of the Enlightenment by Voegelin, who condemns its world-immanent religiosity, and Peter Gay, who recommends it as a sober neo-Paganism, exemplified in David Hume, “the complete modern pagan.”106 The temptation is strong to restrict historiography to description and explanation because of the legitimate fear of partisanship, bias, and prejudice. Herbert Butterfield, for example, eloquently pleads for the “technical historian,” who reconstructs the past in its own context and refrains from passing moral judgments. Yet Butterfield, as Sir Isaiah Berlin has pointed out, fails to distinguish between the procedures and methods proper to the natural sciences and those proper to historiography, for the latter employs the same approach and language as we find in ordinary life—an approach and language reflecting moral concern. Berlin’s observation fits in neatly with Lonergan’s characterization of scholarship as a sophisticated extension of common-sense understanding using ordinary language.107 A scientific description, we might say, would state that the Nazis killed six million Jews. An ordinary language description, on the other hand, would more likely state that the Nazis murdered six million Jews. Does murder ever happen in history? Can it not be a most significant, if supremely dis-

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turbing, historical event? Would not the historian be derelict if, in principle, he or she would refrain from reporting it? Simply put, can historians be true to the full scope of their craft and systematically ignore the moral dimension at the heart of the drama of historical existence? Can they ignore the quest for value, with its structure of deliberation, decision, and actions and its struggle against the counter-pulls of inauthenticity? To do so, as a matter of policy, would seem to risk telling a tale with no genuine dramatic import at all. The common-sense world is a moral world. Historiography, it is true, rises above the common-sense world by its reflective and critical capacity. But this is neither to cut it off entirely from the existential history of a people nor to sever it from historicity: it is a critical interpretation of past performance that itself can become an element in future performance. Hence Lonergan quotes approvingly Meinecke’s statement that history as concerned with values “gives us the content, wisdom, and signposts of our lives.” Lonergan also subscribes to Carl Becker’s conclusions about the value of historical studies: “The value of history . . . is not scientific but moral: by liberating the mind, by deepening the sympathies, by fortifying the will, it enables us to control, not society, but ourselves—a much more important thing; it prepares us to live more humanely in the present and to meet rather than to foretell the future.”108 Historiography nourishes a cultivated and refined common sense: one at once educated to a mature appreciation of the limits of the present historical situation with its superstitions, conventions, and prejudices and led to the discovery of the role of the fortuitous and the unexpected in human affairs (which, riding against the tide of determinism, can sustain a kind of hope clothed in irony); one awakened to a sophisticated awareness of the intricate web of motives, circumstances, and actions ordinarily lying behind historical developments; one opened to a broad contemplation of human glory and of human folly and drawn to a humble recognition of the relative equidistance of both human achievement and human iniquity before the eternal.109 In short, it fosters an elevated, purified common sense allied with basic horizon. Historiography—simultaneously scientific and artistic—has its own distinct contribution to offer historical life by creating an enhanced imagination of human reality. There still is needed a safeguard against partisanship and a priori philosophical constructions. Protection is afforded against placing historical facts into some Procrustean bed when descriptive and explanatory history are functionally prior to evaluative history—that is, when the scholarly approach to the past, which judges facts, precedes and becomes the foundation for the scholarly encounter with the past, which judges values.


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Evaluation is nevertheless implicit in research, exegesis, and descriptive and explanatory history. All such accounts must select material and present it in some coherent and organized fashion based on what is considered significant and worthwhile. All such accounts are influenced by the horizons of the researchers, interpreters, or historians.110 Finally, all such accounts, as both Weber and Becker admitted, respond to the value of truth. If research, interpretation, and history are “value-free,” it is because the commitment to the value of truth takes precedence over adherence to social and other cultural goals.111 Thus, in this qualified sense, researchers, exegetes, and historians subordinate their judgments of value to the task of determining judgments of fact.112 If evaluation is covertly operative in research, exegesis, and descriptive and explanatory history, then the danger lurks that some overly partisan stances—some attachments to political, social, or apologetic aims that mar objectivity—will filter through the safety screen of “value-free” scholarship.113 Because scholarship of this sort runs counter to the ideal he espouses, Lonergan must defend against it. He seems to hint at two remedies. First, evaluative historiography can expose such partisan intrusions by partaking of the effort of cosmopolis to critique the abuses and myths that parade under the banners of political, social, and ideological movements: While shifts of power in themselves are incidental, they commonly are accompanied by another phenomenon of quite a different character. There is the creation of myths. The old regime is depicted as monstrous; the new envisages itself as the immaculate embodiment of ideal human aspiration. Catchwords that carried the new group to power assume the status of unquestionable verities. On the band-wagon of the new vision of truth there ride the adventurers in ideas that otherwise could not attain a hearing. Inversely, ideas that merit attention are ignored unless they put on the trappings of the current fashion, unless they pretend to result from alien but commonly accepted premises, unless they disclaim implications that are true but unwanted. It is the business of cosmopolis to prevent the formation of the screening memories by which an ascent to power hides its nastiness; it is its business to prevent the falsification of history with which the new group overstates its case; it is its business to satirize the catchwords and the claptrap and thereby to prevent the notions they express from coalescing with passions and resentments to engender obsessive nonsense for future generations; it is its business to encourage and support those that would speak the simple truth though simple truth has gone out of fashion. Unless cosmopolis undertakes this essential task, it fails in its mission. One shift of power is followed by another, and if the

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Lonergan and Historiography myths of the first survive, the myths of the second will take their stand on earlier nonsense to bring forth worse nonsense still.114

Second, dialectical analysis, in addition to passing judgments on historical persons, events, and movements, can bring into the light of day partisan viewpoints and competing philosophical horizons found in research, exegesis, and descriptive and explanatory history.115 Critical investigators can evaluate the works of scholars by forcing different interpretive frameworks into the open, by reducing differences to underlying roots, by identifying the roots that are radical, dialectically opposed horizons (in contrast to perspectivism or to the discovery of new data), by focusing on the dialectical clashes, by differentiating positions and counterpositions, and by revising scholarship and, consequently, reassessing the history that is written about.116 An instructive combination of historiography and dialectical analysis is Hayden White’s methodologically sensitive Metahistory, which interprets leading nineteenth-century historians (Michelet, Tocqueville, Ranke, Burckhardt) and philosophers of history (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce) with a keen recognition that “there can be no ‘proper history’ which is not at the same time ‘philosophy of history.’”117 White argues that histories tend to fall into distinct camps in terms of organization of narrative plot (Romantic, Tragic, Comic, Satirical), of framework of causal explanation (Formist, Mechanistic, Organicist, Contextualist), of ideological viewpoint (Anarchist, Radical, Conservative, Liberal), and of mode of stylistic expression (Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche, Irony). He reduces, classifies, and identifies four opposing sets of affinities among the sequence of interpretive schemes (Romantic, Formist, Anarchist, Metaphor/Tragic, Mechanistic, Radical, Metonymy/Comic, Organicist, Conservative, Synecdoche/Satirical, Contextualist, Liberal, Irony). He indicates his own approach has been in the Ironic mode, a mode that presumably leads him to conclude that the ultimate ground for choosing an interpretive horizon is aesthetic and moral, not epistemological. He would, therefore, turn Irony against itself to admit that it is only one of a number of possible postures and urge the “reconstitution of history as a form of intellectual activity which is at once poetic, scientific, and philosophical in its concerns—as it was during history’s golden age in the nineteenth century.”118 Lonergan’s methodological approach does not eliminate opposing viewpoints, for the critics will themselves differ in their evaluation of scholars.119 Nor will criticism of the critics suffice to liquidate the problem. Thus, White’s Metahistory attacks conventionally minded historians, whereas White’s own treatment of the “deep level of consciousness” does


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not penetrate to the conscious structure of what Lonergan terms basic horizon.120 The functional specialty of “dialectics” does, however, illuminate the fundamental divisions in scholarship and their basic philosophical roots: differences among historians are, in the last resort, differences of philosophies. And this serves ultimately to transpose the issue from the conflicts of the past to the horizon of the investigator in the present. As one encounters the past through evaluative exegesis or evaluative history, one’s own living can be challenged to its core; one’s own self-understanding —one’s own horizon—can be “put to the test.” This is to say that the activity of evaluative history or of dialectical analysis reveals the selves doing the evaluation and the analysis. Not only will crucial questions be asked about others in the past and about other investigators, but the occasion will be presented for self-scrutiny, an objectification of subjectivity “in the style of the crucial experiment.” Evaluation and dialectical analysis provide historians and critics with a spur, an invitation to reflect upon their own performance in the drama of history and an appeal to identify in that performance the norms—cognitive and existential—of basic horizon. Dialectics, then, poses further relevant, philosophical questions. It does not answer those questions; it does not erect a foundation for philosophical positions.121 Awareness of this fact need not lead to the hasty conclusion that basic horizon cannot be objectified, as Hayden White seems to argue when he says that “the best grounds for choosing one perspective on history rather than another are ultimately aesthetic or moral rather than epistemological.”122 It need engender historical skepticism only if it is assumed that philosophical problems cannot, in principle, be resolved. But such a conclusion, it should be noted, is a philosophical statement—formulated within the philosophical horizon of relativism—and not an historical one. In answer, then, to the question raised at the beginning of the present chapter about the relationship between historical objectivity and historical evaluation in Lonergan’s thought, we can observe that he does not retreat to an earlier age of historical scholarship and abrogate the critical claims of scientific history, and yet he espouses evaluative historiography. Nor does he renounce the demands for a critique of meaning, and yet he restricts descriptive and explanatory history to making judgments of fact. Rather, Lonergan’s solution is to preserve both scientific and evaluative history by dividing them into distinct functional specialties. The decision, though, is not arbitrary because it is based on the spontaneous, structured relation between the distinct levels of rational consciousness and existential consciousness. In other words, prior to the writing of history, the distinction between judgments of fact and judgments of value is operative in the existential history that is written about.


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Figure 1: Historical Scholarship and Methodological Cooperation _____________________________________________________________________

----- dialectical analyses

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Chapter 3 History of Thought and Praxis

For the data on man are largely the products of man’s own thinking. . . .

If e t hi cs is neither a matter of deducing conduct from abstract rules “out there,” nor a matter of calculating a balance of pleasures over pains, nor a matter a simply “feeling good,” nor a matter of a personal expression of one’s unique “lifestyle”—but it is, rather, a matter of conduct faithful to the norms ingredient in the self-correcting and selftranscending process of moral inquiry—then a crucial ethical moment of self-transcendence is the openness of the process to authentic human possibility in light of current human actuality. Authentic human possibility always goes beyond current human actuality. Current human actuality always limits authentic human possibility. Hence we observe the tension of limitation and transcendence. But this tension of limitation and transcendence must be negotiated, and, indeed, ethical life is precisely the ongoing negotiation by individuals and historical communities of the tension. The negotiation must observe that the data on human actuality are the product of human thinking. The human world is a world constituted by selfinterpretation. Thus a watershed ethical moment occurs in history when an intellectual superstructure emerges to reflect critically upon more spontaneous human thinking and self-interpretation. So, according to Lonergan, the functional specialties of “research,” “interpretation,” “history,” and “dialectics” execute a serious ethical commission as they, respectively, gather data on, understand, judge, and evaluate the history of thought. The immanent momentum of this collaboration leads to a decisive encounter with basic philosophical issues from the past as they become challenges in the present. The decisive philosophical 75

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encounter, in turn, mediates a retrospective glance on the history of thought and, with it, revisions and reversals—all of which ground affirmations of basic philosophical positions consonant with cognitive, moral, and spiritual inquiry that allow for further development and communication. Along parallel lines, philosophical encounter mediates social policy, social planning, and social praxis. Given, then, the very prominence of human thinking in the drama of human existence, we must inquire whether there are not also field specializations—disciplines focused on discrete fields of the data of the history of thought, whose methodical cooperation might sharpen the edge of critical encounter with the past. Although most currents of human thinking are not part of what can be called, in a strict sense, the stream of the history of philosophy, the diverse fields of human thinking, however, are related to each other along a continuum whose upper limit is explicit philosophical statement. Correspondingly, the different fields investigating the history of thought would be linked to each other within the project of engaging the subject matter of philosophical assumptions. As the functional specialties support the possibility of critical culture by mediating dialectical encounter with factually objective scholarship, so the coordination of field specialization in the history of thought can support the possibility of critique by displaying in the series of fields an increasingly explicit philosophical component. Such is the argument of this chapter, which, although not an argument proffered by Lonergan, is the inevitable conclusion to be drawn from his analysis of culture and from his stress on the critical task of the history of thought. Because of profound philosophical controversies and confusions, there are deep serious terminological problems with “thought.” The term thought, as employed here, means more than just speculative ideas; it embraces practical ideas, motives, purposes, goals, ideals, values, beliefs, sentiments, and attitudes; it enters into the bustling sphere of action. Technology is the fruit of human invention. Social institutions embody practical insights in a recurrent pattern of behavior. Political decisions are informed by factual assessments, social aspirations, and religious beliefs. It is the primary concern of historians of technology, society, and politics to examine the role of thought in these domains. Culture, in this broad sense simply as human “thinking,” is inextricably linked to the technical and social aspects of human existence. Still, there is also culture in a more specific sense—namely, the dimension of historical reality where human beings reflect on the meaning and value of their ways of life. To be sure, all human thought, and indeed action, has to some extent this hermeneutical quality: it is always a revelation of at least an implicit self-interpretation. The ideas

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that enter into tool making, for instance, carry with themselves an implicit affirmation of human possibility as homo technus, and so, too, with the ideas embedded in the routines of social life or influencing the ebb and flow of political affairs. Yet there remains a sphere of human thinking devoted directly, if not always thematically, to an interpretation of the meaning and value of human living as its object and content. And it is primarily the investigation of human thinking on this level of self-interpretation— whether direct or indirect, thematic or compact—that we place under the rubric of the history of thought.1 Let us briefly explore the main objections, or counterpositions, to this project. First, there is the attempt to reduce the cultural to the sociotechnical sphere. Lonergan would reject, for example, what Maurice Mandelbaum has referred to as the doctrine of “social monism,” the doctrine held by Comte, Hegel, Marx, Spengler, and Functionalists that any element in society is related to the other elements within that society to such an intimate degree that it can be understood only through understanding them and through understanding the society as a whole.2 To accept, as Lonergan does, that there is a complex series of connections among technical, economic, political, and cultural facets is by no means to adopt the “organic” or “essentialist” model in which culture is considered to be entirely subsumed within the organic totality of a society or to be a manifestation of some social essence. Reflective people can be dissatisfied with the technological, economic, and political arrangements in which they find themselves and, through their culture, pose questions of meaning and value that create a gap—often accompanied by anxiety—between themselves and the technological, economic, and political networks. Lonergan’s basic justification for the relative autonomy of human culture is that the human cultural impulse—conditioned though it may be by technology, economy, and polity—is ultimately rooted in the pure desire to know and the intention of the good. Second, Lonergan would reject the idea of “cultural monism”—the idea that the various and particular intellectual, aesthetic, religious, and moral aspects of life cannot be understood in their individuality at all but must universally be treated as parts of an organic whole, of a cultural “soul.”3 The history of consciousness essentially involves a tendency toward more differentiation and specialization. Although cultures of undifferentiated societies come closest to the organic model in terms of their homogeneity, more advanced, complex cultures show greater pluralism, greater possibility of fragmentation, and greater isolation of cultural elements as these cultures become divided into distinct aesthetic, religious, philosophic, scientific, and scholarly orientations, each constituting the nucleus of a

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relatively independent cultural community with its own internal history. Moreover, the persons within these communities can preserve their own measure of independence, for they can innovate, sustain, or challenge the prevailing tradition, as the great creators, founders, and preservers of religions, philosophical schools, scientific systems, and styles in art and literature bear witness. Third, Lonergan’s antinominalism requires that these elements be interpreted as generally interconnected and interacting with each other. Thus, we can judge, while Lonergan would be sympathetic to Mandelbaum’s position of “cultural pluralism,” he would also join with John Passmore to emphasize that cultural reality, rather than being a pluralism of isolated units, is a pluralism of complex and linked forms of activity, however much the degree of interaction might vary at particular times and places.4 The complex and linked forms of activity are rooted in the intentionality of human consciousness and the horizon boundedness of human thinking— factors that empiricists, subjective idealists, and deconstructionists fail to give their due. Even more devastating is the failure to acknowledge the role of insight, whether the failure comes from an overemphasis on experience or from an overemphasis on interpretations or linguistic constructs. If we are to eschew various forms of reductionism, essentialism, and nominalism in the project of the history of thought, we must also identify the main presuppositions for the enterprise. They are, in fact, five—each grounding a distinct field specialization in the history of thought. First, along with underlying intellectual assumptions, the horizon of a culture is influenced by underlying psychological factors. It is not a disembodied, freely floating consciousness. The sensitive psyche affects the orientations, aspirations, and limits of cultural horizons in a fashion that places it in a strange area on the frontier of cultural life. Although geographical, technological, and economic situations impinge upon cultural reality from the outside, psychic energy is directly tied to acts of meaning and valuing. Psychic disturbances, which reflect frustrated demands of the nervous system or existential dislocation, can obstruct human understanding, whereas images and symbols emerging from the psychic depths can expand the horizon of a community and pump new blood into its heart to revitalize it on the path of inquiry. The dynamics of the psyche, either constraining or fostering the drive of inquiry, must not be conceived as that of an entirely natural process that would intrude upon history, but as that of a process of integration bound up with the historicity of a community as it performs and interprets in the drama of existence.5 Second, there is an inherent human propensity to organize experiences into meaningful, coherent configurations—into a central structural core at


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the heart of both personal and communal horizons, in contrast to the undifferentiated unorganized “conglomerate world.”6 Fundamental questions flow over into fundamental assumptions that cut across different cultural communities in particular places at particular times. The fundamental assumptions are precisely those orientations held in common by such fields as art, literature, religion, science, scholarship, mathematics, philosophy, and theology. Although they define the common horizon of the particular individual communities, they do not thereby exhaust the intellectual vitality and concern of any given community or of the persons within it. The historian cannot predetermine the extent to which a culture has tightly knit underlying assumptions because the historical possibilities can range from the extreme of approximating an organic totality within an age of thought or the extreme of utter fragmentation among cultural communities. Depending upon the greater or lesser amount of coherence within a given culture, the status of the historian’s interpretation will range from an actual description of historical reality to what Lonergan calls idealtypes. It is legitimate, then, in the study of the history of thought to speak of a Zeitgeist, providing that the term is shorn of all idealist metaphysical trappings and the qualifications mentioned above are kept in mind. The historian is not faced with the alternative of choosing between a Zeitgeist approach or a history of ideas approach because each of these two methods of historical analysis complements and enriches the other. Third, within given cultural communities, and frequently overlapping diverse cultural communities, a decided concentration on particular issues, questions, and problems can persist over time. The recurrence of such issues, questions, and problems establishes a thematic continuity in the history of thought that can indeed span different historical epochs. The possibility of continuity of subject matter and changing historical circumstances is grounded in the intentionality of human consciousness. Fourth, Lonergan marks the crucial division of culture into an infrastructure and a superstructure.7 Diverse as cultural communities may be, they nonetheless will tend to share common terrain as they reside in either one or the other of these two cultural territories. The cultural infrastructure is the dimension of culture in which there is a spontaneous apprehension and communication of meaning; it is the world of rite, symbol, art, and ordinary language, the climate of tastes, moods, manners, and morals. The cultural superstructure, on the other hand, is the more reflective, deliberate, and critical apprehension and communication of meaning found in philosophy, theology, scholarship, science, and literary criticism. The differentiation of a cultural superstructure will create a corresponding “intellectual culture.”

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Fifth, one particular cultural community will deserve special attention in the history of thought—namely, philosophy. By systematic focus on the most basic and foundational intellectual issues, it differs from other cultural communities and dimensions of culture, and yet by explicating what is present only implicitly, or inchoately, or diffusely, in the other cultural communities, it is likewise linked to them—and linked to them in a manner decisive to the effort of critical self-interpretation. Positions and counterpositions reverberate throughout the entire historical world. Based, then, on these presuppositions, we can present a summary identification of the pertinent fields in the history of thought. First, the integral nature of human reality—that is, human reality as a dynamic set of higher organic, psychic, and intellectual integrations—means that affects and images play a crucial, if not also problematic, role in human thinking. The role, and the problem of integration, deserves investigation. We can call this psychohistory. Second, human thinking absorbs affect and image in the task of self-interpretation in the cultural infrastructure, both in historical eras of undifferentiated consciousness and in historical eras when a cultural superstructure has been differentiated. The interpretations of the cultural infrastructure are bounded by horizons of questions and assumptions about reality, being ultimately, if implicitly, philosophical in scope. We can call this cultural history. Third, given the intentionality of human consciousness, questions can persist from one historical context or horizon to another, opening up a legitimate field of historical investigation without accepting idealism or essentialism. We can call this the history of ideas. Fourth, the differentiation of the cultural superstructure creates communities of inquirers who, with varying degrees of cohesion at different times and places, share questions and assumptions across different specialized intellectual disciplines. These intellectual horizons tend to express common themes, interests, and interpretations that are decidedly philosophical in character if frequently behind the scenes and in need of explication. We can call this intellectual history. Fifth, philosophy, in its emergence, is a constitutive event in intellectual history. It fosters its own intellectual community and is engaged in an ongoing appropriation of its tradition in the meaningful concreteness of historical circumstances. If cultural and intellectual horizons are bounded by questions and filtered through assumptions, philosophy questions the questions and identifies, probes, analyzes, and criticizes the assumptions. We can call this, genuinely, the history of philosophy. Philosophy identifies and criticizes positions and counterpositions, thus contributing uniquely to the effort of critical self-interpretation.8 Commenting and expanding upon Lonergan’s ideas, let us examine, in turn, psychohistory, cultural history, history of ideas, intellectual history,


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and the history of philosophy. The sequences of fields will display, as a general rule, a progression of increasingly explicit philosophical self-interpretation.

Psychohistory Perhaps of all the fields in the history of thought, psychohistory is the most controversial, the least developed, the least settled, and yet, in certain of its practitioners, the most inclined to aspire to totalitarian ambition over other fields. Can psychohistory really contribute to the knowledge of the past? Even if it can do so, in what sense can it be said actually to constitute a definable field of historical studies? Notwithstanding the extravagant reductionist claims and glaring errors of the more zealous partisans of psychohistory, which may seem to discredit it, the answer to the first question, we shall argue, is a clear yes. The answer to the second question must be a more guarded yes. Psychohistory confronts four major difficulties. The first problem is a methodological one: drawing hasty conclusions from scanty textual evidence. The psychohistorian has typically less data to work with than does the therapist engaged in ongoing sessions with clients. The danger is by no means entirely unique to psychohistory, but psychohistory, usually claiming a scientific status, is plagued with the temptation to apply theories a priori in handling concrete historical events. This points to a second problem, the propensity for psychohistory to be a crypto (if not pseudo) science in the disguise of historiography, to regale in the environs of idealtypes and not to take seriously enough the necessary attachment of good historiography to the terra firma of what Weber named situational analysis. As Jacques Barzun so perceptively states it, some versions of psychohistory are programs of “psychologizing with the aid of history,” where the aim is not to study res gestae (things done), not to explain persons, novelty, or actual events, but to abstract from historical particularity to ascertain average trends and deterministic processes.9 Third, the prospective psychohistorian is faced with a legion of competing psychological theories, styles, and schools. Even the attempt to provide a descriptive or an explanatory account would seem immediately to run into the dazzling battleground of dialectics. Just as the danger lurks that the psychologist dabbling in history will be sloppy in pursuing historical method, so the peril lies in wait that the professional historian delving into psychohistory will be unfamiliar with the most recent advances and the most intricate problems in psychology only to opt for a kind of crude dogmatizing with a convenient model in hand (often Freudian). Finally, there is the problem

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of being intoxicated with reductionism, compressing the entire history of thought into the dynamics of the sensitive psyche, and, most disastrously, falling prey to ad hominem arguments against certain thinkers, labeled as sick, so as to explain their ideas in (negative) psychological categories. Having leveled these caveats against psychohistory, we might wonder if there are any positive contents left. Yet psychohistory seems to have a rich soil in which to nourish its genuine possibilities. It has enormous possibilities—perhaps, thus far, more than actuality—both as a handmaiden ancillary to other fields in the history of thought and as a worker in its own domain. In the latter area it can cultivate a unique sensitivity to the role of symbols, dreams, and myths in the historical drama of persons and communities, to psychic transformations in the history of consciousness, and to the concrete imprint of psychic aberration on the landscape of historical situations. Legitimate psychohistory—psychohistory, that is, as true history—would employ judiciously selected psychological theories, and the more adequate the philosophical grounding, the better. And it would apply them through a sophisticated extension of common sense to explain real change, movement, and events; its model would not be scientific deduction, but the self-correcting process of learning. Let us turn to some illustrations. Psychohistorical studies can illuminate intellectual biography in two regions. First, there is the specter of what Lonergan calls “scotosis.” This malady is caused by a kind of censorship that represses images and inhibits performance. The repression can involve biological needs, but also a flight from experiences of dread, guilt, and the transcendent; it usually entails a tension between demands of the nervous system for images and affects and a person’s conscious orientation in living.10 The repression and the inhibition can inaugurate a process of psychic breakdown, thereby creating a type of hidden personality structure—a twilight land of consciousness. There is a blind spot in one’s understanding, a bias that tugs at one’s thought and influences one’s action. It can, for example, infect moral sensitivity, contribute to moral impotence, color one’s affective response to linguistic and symbolic expressions, generate excessive religious pretensions, and restrict the asking of questions in those areas that evoke experiences of anxiety and dread. Psychohistory, then, can fathom why a certain range of questions was effectively beyond a person’s horizon or why another range of questions was particularly attractive. It can shed light on half-understood motives and explain certain anomalies in a thinker’s ideas. But psychohistory can provide only limited assistance to the biographer who wishes to account for cultural and intellectual creativ-


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ity. In writing a cultural or an intellectual biography, for instance, it may be enlightening to become aware of Michelangelo’s sexual feelings, or interesting to learn about Saint Augustine’s relation to his mother, or helpful to know of Max Weber’s sexual repression, but countless people have had such psychological experiences or disabilities and very few of them become a Michelangelo, a Saint Augustine, or a Max Weber. Psychohistory, in brief, can contribute to explain the nature of a person’s experience. But what is most telling and significant from the standpoint of cultural and intellectual history is the meaning of that experience for the person, how he or she reacted to it, what he or she did with it.11 Psychological problems— at least those short of psychosis—limit the range of viable alternatives in a person’s life, but they do not absolutely determine the actual choice of alternatives. It is the obligation of the cultural and intellectual biographer to zero in on those factors, events, and decisions that actually do form the creative personality, that constitute the unique achievements of such towering figures as Michelangelo, Saint Augustine, and Max Weber. By identifying psychic aberration, psychohistory can assist the disciplines of cultural and intellectual history, but it is no substitute for them because it is incapable of accounting for cultural and intellectual products precisely as cultural and intellectual products. Nevertheless, in a second area, psychobiography has a more positive task: exploring the infrastructure of cultural and intellectual creativity through the symbols, dreams, affective moods, and stories that partake of the drama of a person’s existence and self-interpretation. These psychic expressions, as revealed in diaries, autobiographies, letters, poems, novels, and artworks, can give the attentive and knowledgeable psychobiographer some access to the interior dimension of a person’s self-development, which is always a unique historical and existential journey. Along similar lines, psychohistory can investigate the historical relationship between psychological situations and technical, social, and cultural realities. In conjunction with specialized histories of religion, art, literature, philosophy, politics, and social institutions, it can trace the historical flowering and wilting of those heuristic insights, those archetypical and anagogic symbols, and those myths and stories that flow together as the communal memory, inspire a vision of the future, legitimate institutions, mold the shape of art and literature, and support the love of wisdom. If the transformation from compactness to differentiation in the history of consciousness witnesses an increasing distinction between self and other and between self and community, then psychohistory has fertile ground where it can compare significant historical variations in psychological

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situations, in psychological problems, and in modes of psychotherapy.12 It can consider, for instance, changing historical patterns of technological, economic, and social differentiation, of child rearing, and of cultural attitudes toward guilt and shame. Perhaps, with some philosophical modifications, the work of Jung and of his followers, such as Eric Neumann, can serve as instructive ideal-types for psychohistorians to examine the luxuriant flora of the history of consciousness.13 Presumably, such studies will locate modern psychological cases in wider and different perspectives. One may question, for example, as does Peter Berger, to what degree the psychoanalytic notion of the “unconscious” is a modern phenomenon resulting from a bifurcation of public and private selves.14 Why have archaic images and symbols, once celebrated in public ritual, been apparently relegated to the dreams of isolated individuals in modern civilization? The last point raises the question of the topic of psychic aberrations in the history of a community.15 Psychohistory can indeed elucidate the correspondence of psychic disturbances and communal neuroses with numerous historical factors and trends: stresses and strains imposed by technological, social, and political constellations; cultural censorship; the failure of cultural and institutional remedies in the face of adverse psychic situations; flight from the dread accompanying attacks on the central core of a communal horizon; and repression of religious symbols and experiences. Psychohistory can expose the psychological elements ingredient in cultural and intellectual decline; it can uncover psychopathological complications that color symbols and languages, that invade the realm of popular culture, that penetrate literary themes, that define the nucleus of deviant subcultures, and that constrict the range of questions asked. It can illuminate the psychic vectors behind such movements as medieval and Reformation messianism and modern political ideologies.16 It can reveal how such psychological needs as overcoming anxiety and achieving security have historically weighed down religions and ideologies. The psychological need for security, or any pathological condition, however, cannot explain the existence of religion, art, literature, philosophy, science, and scholarship. Religion is rooted in experiences associated with the loving openness of the pure question and attached to archetypal and anagogic symbols.17 Art and literature portray the generic human wonder in its elemental sweep, exploring, against any narrow, limited, and secure viewpoint, the possibilities of human living (see next section).18 Philosophy, science, and scholarship are grounded in the pure desire to know, which challenges the boundaries of every concrete horizon. Psychohistorians, rather than delving into the ultimate origins of religion, art, literature, philosophy, science, and scholarship, probe the psychic reservoir and


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undertow of cultural and intellectual creativity or diagnose the psychic distortions that inhibit and impair these forms of cultural and intellectual life.

Cultural History Lonergan, as previously noted, defines culture as “the set of meanings and values that inform a way of life.”19 If culture is so defined, then it would seem quite appropriate to apply the term “cultural history” to descriptive approaches sweeping across all the diverse landscapes of popular culture, art, literature, religion, tastes, manners, morals, science, scholarship, philosophy, and theology; cultural history would be distinguished from such other broad categories as technological, social, or political histories because its primary concern would be the project of human self-interpretation. In short, it would seem appropriate to include under the rubric of the “history of culture” both the history of the cultural infrastructure and the history of the cultural superstructure. And yet Lonergan does on at least one occasion restrict “cultural history” to art, literature, religion, and language.20 Why? He provides no answer. Perhaps Lonergan believes that the cultural infrastructure carries meaning and value much more immediately and spontaneously to the pulsing flow of human living than does the cultural superstructure. His particular use of the term, furthermore, seems to reflect the old root meaning of “culture,” which is “to cultivate and to educate”; stemming, as it does, from the Latin cultus, “culture” has continued to be associated with a “care directed to the refinement of life”; and its qualities of excellence of taste, eloquence, polish, style, manners, clothing, decorum, and apparel are preeminently qualities of the cultural infrastructure. Now, of course, the normative dimension to culture in the sense of cultivation is not a set of standards “out there” forever captured in some classicist culture that is to be the true measure of civilized life. True culture, true paideia, is a task driven by a heuristic ideal.21 Its norms are emblazoned in the process of the search for meaning and the quest for value, animating precivilized societies as well as civilizations. But is this not precisely a process present also at the core of the cultural superstructure and its critique of meaning? Recalling the point argued earlier in this chapter—that terminological debate in this case could mire us in the swamp of needless subtlety—we shall, accordingly, retire from the fray and simply adopt Lonergan’s convention of equating cultural history with the history of the cultural infrastructure. The history of culture, in this sense, examines the causal relations among the horizons of the everyday world, art, literature, and religion, explains the changing patterns of cultural life, including the genesis and decline of

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cultural perspectives, and traces the mutual influences between the cultural infrastructure and technical and social realities.22 The cultural historian must display a certain artistic talent, for one of his or her tasks is to portray the mood of a period—to detect any discernable trends or styles embracing tastes, fashions, conventions, sentiments, attitudes, morals, and manners. Cultural history is unquestionably one of the most subjective of historical disciplines. The historian of culture must have the capacity to empathize with the subject matter—to cultivate the skill of reexperiencing past images, feelings, sentiments, and values. But this is decidedly not subjectivity in any pejorative sense. The cultural infrastructure is bound with the intention of truth. The element of entertainment in culture, especially in popular culture, cannot obscure the main thrust of culture as “serious play.”23 Thus Lonergan, as we have seen, stresses that aesthetic consciousness shows forth the human wonder—the wonder which is the source of all knowledge. Aesthetic consciousness represents the human affective response to the truth of the human condition, exploring the possibilities of human living that transcend the boundaries of the merely here and now. Both artist and historian operate within the horizon encompassed by the intention of truth. The historian’s appreciation and evaluation of cultural history, then, is in itself no more an unwanted intrusion of subjectivity than is the artist’s creation “merely subjective.” Aesthetic consciousness has its own form of objectivity, its own way of apprehending reality, and hence its own philosophical content.24 The cultural historian therefore also enters the terrain of philosophy. He or she articulates the pretheoretic, spontaneous self-interpretation of a people—its existential history and its existential philosophy. He or she makes thematic the attitude of a people toward its past and lays out its basic implicit philosophical assumptions and substantive philosophical conflicts; in effect, he or she translates the symbols, artistic reflections, and nontechnical language of the cultural infrastructure, to the extent possible, into the more precise expressions of the cultural superstructure, albeit through a scholarship that is at once dramatic and artistic, preserving, in particular, a sense of the cultural infrastructure’s adventure into the known unknown. In this domain, the cultural historian can profit from a familiarity with philosophical analysis. Historiography of this sort bears a different relation to intellectual history, history of consciousness, and history of philosophy, depending upon the extent of development of the cultural superstructure in any given society or period. When it investigates cultures with little or no superstructure of science, philosophy, theology, or scholarship, cultural history can serve in


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the stead of intellectual history and the history of philosophy because it uncovers the crucial intellectual assumptions—the fundamental worldview—of those cultures.25 It also supplies the history of consciousness with evidence of compact cultural horizons. When cultural historians study those transformations of symbols, art, and literature that have played a conspicuous role in breakthroughs to differentiated consciousness, the history of culture can be fruitfully incorporated into the history of consciousness. Gerardus van der Leeuw, for instance, has recorded the gradual evolution of music, song, literature, and drama into distinct art forms out of an original unity of art that radiated around the primitive dance. Lonergan himself, employing the work of Bruno Snell, has sketched how early Greek poetry staked out new areas of the mind, which later became scholarship, science, and philosophy: epic sagas opened the way to history, the cosmogonies paved the road to Ionian speculation, the lyric cleared the path to Heraclitus, and the drama led to Socrates and Plato. In later antiquity, the genres, styles, and tone of poetry, in turn, breathed in the atmosphere of literary criticism and theories of poetry.26 Finally, the cultural history of more advanced cultures—those with highly sophisticated superstructures—complements intellectual history because the cultural infrastructure and the cultural superstructure overlap. The critical enterprise of cosmopolis (the dimension of culture commensurate with the norms of basic horizon) requires the joint cooperation of both cultural history and intellectual history to evaluate the meanings and values that have constituted human self-interpretation in these differentiated cultures. The cultural superstructure rides on the achievements, orientations, and innermost convictions revealed in the cultural infrastructure. So the historian can argue for a correlation between Plato’s Forms and the highly detached art of fourth-century Hellas. Or the historian can suggest an isomorphism between the structure of the great Summas of Scholastic thought and the cosmion of a Gothic cathedral. At the same time, intellectual developments affect tastes, sentiments, and morals, inform and reorder canons, styles, and themes of art and literature, and reverberate in the world of religion.27 Neither the paintings of Michelangelo nor Western mysticism, for example, can be understood apart from Neo-Platonism. Dante cannot be interpreted apart from Thomas Aquinas, Alexander Pope from Newton, science fiction from modern natural science, or the Theatre of the Absurd from Existentialism. That the cultural infrastructure has intellectual content and its own distinct mode of apprehending reality is vividly demonstrated in the case of aesthetic consciousness, which tends to collapse its insights, judgments,

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and evaluations onto the level of experience.28 Lonergan’s excursions into this territory in his philosophy of education lectures, drawing upon Langer, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bergson, suggest, in bold outline, the metaphysical perspectives the sensitive cultural historian can encounter. We can focus on Lonergan’s discussion of sculpture, architecture, music, poetry, and drama. Following Merleau-Ponty, Lonergan describes the human body as “feeling space.” Prior to the axes of objectified reference (north, south, east, and west; up and down) the baby learns to control the movement of its different members, thereby constituting kinesthetic space, feeling distributed through space. This organizing space is the space that I am: the space of a subject. The statue is an objectivation, a visual representation of this interior space: it is an objectivation of the embodied presence of the self. Thus is explored “that volume (defined by the nude statue) of sensing, feeling, reaching, longing space which is the human body.”29 Architecture, on the other hand, expresses objective axes of reference for the group. If one’s world, as Heidegger has it, consists of places and ways to get there and back, then architecture is an expression of the center of the communal world, its fundamental orientation and basic values, its home.30 The physical horizon of the Middle Ages was dotted by castles and cathedrals. The contemporary Western city, on the contrary, displays its life-orientation through the domineering skyline of stock exchanges, banks, and office buildings.31 As the cultural historian learns about the idea of the self in sculpture, so he or she discovers the self-interpretation of a society in architecture. Would not the study of the connection between sculpture and architecture by the cultural historian reveal the outlook a people has toward the relation of self and society?32 Painting takes one beyond the space of the ordinary world, omitting all kinesthetic elements and all auditory elements.33 Lines, volumes, intersecting planes, shadows, and light, with their varying proportions, are all composed into a pattern of balances, tensions, and resolutions, and in accord with the vital logic of art they create a unity of vision. Painting, perhaps more than other spatial art forms, is a release of potentiality—an upsurge of energy exploring the possibilities of human living. Within the limits of the artistic scene, bounded by its frame, is portrayed the vision of the artist limited by his or her horizon, and usually by the horizon of his or her age. One can see, revealed on canvas in the last century, for example, the inner tensions of positivism and romanticism winding their way through the changing colors, forms, and textures of Realism, Impressionism, Symbolism, Cubism, Expressionism, and Surrealism.


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Music, unlike the art forms of sculpture, architecture, painting, drama, and poetry, is without spatial image; it demands or represents time rather than space, or, more precisely, it represents an image of experienced time, a nonspatial shape corresponding to the manner in which feelings multiply and change, rather than an image of one-dimensional, measured and spatial time. The time of music is the psychological time of Aquinas’s nunc and Bergson’s duree puré. It is the time of the in-between, the time of historicity, an overlap of time spans reaching back into the past through memory and reaching out into the future (and toward the beyond) through anticipation. The movement of the music expresses rhythm, turmoil, and peace by the blending of themes with their oppositions, tensions, and resolutions.34 If music represents time rather than space, then is not the history of music, or, perhaps more accurately, the history of the interaction of music and art in a culture, also the history of the human attitude to time and to history? Van der Leeuw, for instance, argues that Schopenhauer’s and Wagner’s emphasis on the essence of the arts as music—which, for them, was pure movement and direct imageless intuition of reality—reflects a nature mysticism or pantheistic reduction of transcendence to immanence, a stance that is harmonious with modern immanentist philosophies of history. It is a stance, however, according to van der Leeuw, that contrasts to primitive consciousness, where dance “comprehends within itself all music, but at the same time living, moving image and form.”35 Lonergan’s philosophy of history implies that the role of music in culture, and particularly its relation to the imaginative arts, is indicative of its understanding of historicity. Would the differentiation of music in a culture parallel a heightened appreciation of historicity? Would the excessive separation of music in a culture point to an imbalanced interpretation of the tension of immanence and transcendence? Poetry (or, to take its Latin root, fiction) explores the possibilities of human existence by exploiting the fact that words have a retinue of associations, which are tactile, kinesthetic, visual, vocal, auditory, affective, and evocative.36 This very resonance of words with the full panoply of human experience is the reason why different forms of poetry bear an affinity to music, architecture, or sculpture—and to the intellectual content expressed by them. Epic poetry, like music, concerns time and history. The epic is one of the oldest vehicles of what Lonergan calls existential history—the living memory of a people that constitutes them as a people. So it was that HoÂ� mer was the educator of Greece. The epic, as a narrative of a group’s past, delights as it informs and instructs; it is at once factual, aetiological, moral,

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and pedagogical. It contains the structure, spirit, ethos, and potential of elementary group consciousness—the common fund of psychic, intellectual, moral, and religious resources that coalesce into the vital core of group meaning. For poetry, along with art, has an extraordinary role to perform in the self-interpretation of a community: poetry makes the tradition come alive. It is indeed an aesthetic apprehension of the origin and story of a group that is most operative and efficacious when the group debates, judges, evaluates, and decides—and especially so in time of crisis.37 Poetry as drama and lyric poetry may be juxtaposed as are architecture and sculpture. Drama and architecture deal with the community; lyric poetry and sculpture focus on the self. Architecture, says Lonergan, is the home of a people, expressing its limits and establishing its bounds, whereas drama is the image of a people’s destiny, the linkage of successive situations by sets of decisions that are not, however, the decisions of any one of the participants. Destiny displays both the freedom of human decision and the limits of freedom. Sculpture is a visual revelation of the interior feeling space of a subject, whereas lyric poetry, which emerged out of the chorus of the drama, explores the moods, orientations, and existential dispositions of the self.38 The intellectual content of the cultural infrastructure is also exhibited in the sphere of religion with its overriding concern for the nature of reality, and it is the history of religion—at least when it goes beyond bare descriptive accounts of dates, persons, and events—that illustrates most clearly the dialectic and evaluative character of cultural history. The subject matter of religious history poses its own distinct hermeneutical problems. Technological, social, and psychological conditions cannot be divorced from religious history, but, for Lonergan, the key factor in religion is religious experience: the experience is sui generis, for it cannot be essentially reduced to material, social, or psychological causes.39 The experience, an undertow of consciousness permeated by a loving openness to reality, underpins the pursuit of truth and the attempt to realize the good in the face of anxiety. Religious experience is the focal point around which revolve the outward manifestations of a true religious community as an historical entity. Although varying in intensity and outlook, religious experience remains the constant behind the history of religious expressions, whether of the rites and symbols of undifferentiated consciousness or of the theologies of differentiated consciousness.40 And yet it is most adequately conveyed as an experience through intersubjective, artistic, literary, symbolic, and incarnate modes of expression. For this reason, it is legitimate—and necessary—to consider the history of religion as a part of the history of cul-


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ture. But because religious experience is sui generis, the history of religion is likewise sui generis, the study of which requires its own specialization. Must we not conclude that an explanatory history of religion must recognize religious experience as a constitutive element in that history? True, the project of religious history is thus beset with enormous difficulties. How can the historian discern a person’s interior religious state? His or her sincerity? His or her religious maturity? The genuine religious substance of a religious community? Moreover, the history of religion is saturated with distortions of meaning, psychic aberrations, egoism, fanaticism, pretensions, and erroneous philosophical presuppositions. Must not an evaluative history of religion discriminate between those religious expressions, events, and movements springing from genuine religious commitment and those marred by bias?41 The historian’s approach in these matters, arduous as it may be, does not differ, in principle, from the assessment of individuals and movements in other historical contexts: the historian must pursue the self-correcting process of learning and exercise due prudence and reserve in rendering historical judgments about religious consciousness. The only other alternatives would be either patently prejudiced partisan accounts or a positivist history of religion, which would, in effect, reduce religious experience entirely to natural or social causes. To be sure, differing, and even contradictory, interpretations will arise that reflect diverse personal backgrounds, communal traditions, and intellectual predilections. But here Lonergan’s functional specialty of “dialectics” offers an open forum for critical analysis of these opposing interpretations of the history of religion, where investigators can ask whether the opposing viewpoints stem from what Lonergan calls “perspectivism” or from fundamentally incompatible philosophical, moral, and religious horizons.42

History of Ideas Lonergan frequently uses language to describe what we have termed cultural history (and intellectual history). Thus, he often speaks about “cultural context,” “cultural milieu,” and “climate of opinion.”43 On the other hand, he has virtually nothing to say explicitly about the history of ideas. To deal with this field, we must, accordingly, draw inferences from his thought and pick the fruit of his cognitional theory. Perhaps the closest Lonergan comes to identifying the history of ideas is in his category of “doctrinal movements”—where “doctrinal” seems to be much broader in scope than the functional specialty of that name. But is it so broad as

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to encompass both history of ideas and intellectual history? “Doctrinal movements,” according to Lonergan, include “mathematics, natural science, human science, philosophy, history, theology.”44 And does this total restriction of “doctrinal movements” to the cultural superstructure do violence to the possibility that the history of ideas can embrace, even if in a less prominent fashion, cognitive activity on the level of the cultural infrastructure? (The Analytic Table of Contents of the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, for example, lists ideas present in common sense, literature, myths, ideologies, and social attitudes.)45 What precisely differentiates history of ideas from intellectual history and cultural history? How, or to what extent, does history of ideas compleÂ� ment intellectual history and cultural history? Can the discipline of history of ideas avoid the extremes of heady idealism or radical empiricism? In what sense can “ideas” have histories? We must first note that Lonergan defines an idea as a content of an act of understanding.46 The history of ideas would seem to be principally the history of understanding, the history of insights, and neither the history of concepts, which are formulations of insights, nor the history of words, which are expressions of acts of understanding. Concepts and words, of course, are not merely instruments; they are intimately bound up with the whole process of thinking, for insights require formulation, and understanding does not occur without a sustaining flow of linguistic expression. Still, concepts (“inner words”) and words (“outer words”) must take a back seat to the act of understanding.47 It is for this reason that an idea may not be entirely exhausted by any particular linguistic expression. Indeed, gradual shifts in the meaning of linguistic expressions may spawn a growing cleft between an idea and a particular linguistic expression. The transmission of meaning can occur only through the continuous—and precarious—interpretation of expressions of meaning. Lonergan, we can judge, by denying a simple one-to-one correspondence between idea and word, would have to reject an approach to the history of ideas in which one merely attended to “what the texts say.” By the same token, given his cognitional theory, Lonergan must likewise caution against excessive fascination with concepts in the history of ideas. To cut concepts off from their engendering insights runs the risk of reifying those concepts into things, and the historian who falls into this trap can easily force a thinker into a preconceived mold by assuming that the thinker deals with obviously recognizable pure concepts-in-themselves; the temptation is strong in this mode of historiography to determine a priori—that is, from the context of the historian’s own horizon—the concepts in the history of ideas. The historian must be capable of grasping the total range of possible meanings


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as a precondition for successful interpretation; but he or she must also be able to pluck actual meanings from the tree of possible meanings by surveying the concrete context and real intentions of an author. The historian, for example, cannot assume a priori that Plato’s concept of politeia in his Republic centers around modern questions of constitutional forms. Nor is it sufficient to consider objects of understanding themselves (which are prior to concepts) as though they emerged in a vacuum. Lonergan does not regard ideas as “Platonic” entities floating around by themselves in an ethereal land, independent of developing minds and historical situations. “Insight,” he mentions, “comes as a release to the tension of inquiry.”48 A thinker’s ideas are conditioned by the questions he or she raises, and the questions he or she raises are conditioned by his or her social environment, cultural milieu, and general historical situation. If the historian of ideas is to avoid an atemporal, antihistorical orientation, then the historian must concentrate analysis on an author’s questions and the various contexts for those questions. Thus, we must conclude that Lonergan’s cognitional theory warns against the tendency in the history of ideas to focus upon concepts, and even to reify ideas, to the detriment of giving due consideration to those questions, concerns, and interests, those formative influences, and those creative acts that lie precisely behind the great “systems of ideas.”49 The study of the history of ideas has come under severe attack on these grounds from writers influenced by Anglo-American ordinary language philosophy—among them, John Dunn and Quentin Skinner, who have documented, with penetrating criticism, the range of foibles to which historians are prone as they succumb to a kind of atemporal analysis of the history of ideas.50 But might too enthusiastic a pruning of the branches of the history of ideas by these philosophers to protect it from the blight of idealism endanger the very existence of the plant? Skinner himself goes so far as to object that there can indeed be no history of ideas in any meaningful sense: Any statement . . . is inescapably the embodiment of a particular intention, on a particular occasion, addressed to the solution of a particular problem, and thus specific to its situation in a way that it can only be naive to try to transcend. . . . There simply are no perennial problems in philosophy; there are only individual answers to individual questions, with as many different answers as there are questions, and as many different questions as there are questioners.51

This question poses the foundational issue about the nature and significance of questioning. Although Skinner and Lonergan both acknowledge

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the decisiveness of questioning, their paths diverge radically after that. Lonergan departs from what appears to be Skinner’s nominalism—his depiction of almost hermetically sealed horizons—by stressing the intention of truth and not the intention of an immanent content of consciousness (a concept, for example), as the crucial factor behind questioning. In Lonergan’s view, a thinker can transcend his or her situation, though never in an absolute way, by being caught up in a question: his or her search for truth defines an horizon that encompasses more than his or her insights and formulations; he or she is open to more than the immediate objects of understanding. We allude to this fact whenever we remark that a thinker operates not only within a relative horizon but also within basic horizon. Hence, is it completely unfair, as Skinner alleges, for an historian to say that a certain figure in the history of thought anticipates the ideas of a later writer, even when the earlier figure would have been unable to formulate the ideas from the resources of his or her relative horizon?52 The entire sweep of the original author’s questions may have been open to later insights and developments, and his or her own insights themselves may have been pregnant with meanings that could neither be expressed nor be developed within the limited framework of his or her linguistic world. Moreover, is the audience of a thinker necessarily and inevitably restricted to people of his or her own age? A political pamphleteer will perhaps have a narrow set of questions in mind and a restricted audience, but the pamphleteer will stand in contrast to the extended range of questions of a Plato or a Kant, who addressed themselves to all lovers of wisdom.53 In our discussion of the history of ideas, we have been compelled to place ideas within the context of questioning. Yet there is a further aspect to the matter. How exactly does the intention of truth establish the link among differing contexts? We must introduce here Lonergan’s notion of heuristic concepts. We shall suggest that there is a peculiar type of idea (an “heuristic idea”) that ties together—logically and perhaps historically—a whole sequence of particular ideas. Now, according to Lonergan’s theory of knowledge, a thinker does not simply intend ideas; the thinker intends ”what is,” and to know “what is,” he or she must engage in both operations of understanding (the contents of which are ideas) and operations of judging. Only when the thinker makes true judgments does he or she become a knower. It is in light of the fact that a question is intentionally related to reality that we must consider the phenomenon of ideas. The questioner is not oriented to a reality that is an undifferentiated totality; the questioner is oriented to a reality that has within it distinctions (kinds of things)—not distinctions arbitrarily imposed by the mind, but distinctions grounded in reality itself. The inquirer


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must have some elementary understanding of reality and of its differentiations; otherwise, his or her questions would be completely amorphous and he or she would never get beyond the rudimentary state of absolute wonder and awe associated with the pure question. When these elementary insights, which are the presuppositions of intellectual endeavor, become sufficiently penetrating, they can be formulated in such a fashion as to guide inquiry in a conscious, reflective manner, thereby constituting a method, an avenue to reality, a way of analysis: an heuristic structure. Such formulated insights Lonergan calls “heuristic concepts.” The historical period when a heuristic concept is formulated is truly a period of the differentiation or discovery of a realm of reality (e.g., the Greek “discovery of the mind”). Heuristic concepts specify that intellectual search is directed at the “nature of” some x (e.g., the “nature of fire”). It is therefore the intellectual activity that is informed and propelled by a heuristic structure that will create an ongoing context over time.54 A heuristic structure will embrace, within a single orientation, numerous ideas, definitions, formulations, and revisions: “Fire was conceived by Aristotle as an element, by Lavoisier’s predecessors as a manifestation of phlogiston, and by later chemists as a type of oxydization. But though the explanations differed, the object to be explained was conceived uniformly as the “nature of” a familiar phenomenon, and without this uniformity it would be incorrect to say that Aristotle had an incorrect explanation of what he meant and we mean by fire.”55 Thus, although the particular ideas, the particular definitions, indeed, the particular questions, regarding the “nature of” fire undergo change during different historical epochs, they all partake of a movement in the history of ideas—a movement unified by a recurrent question about the nature of fire. To be sure, new questions, ideas, and concepts can alter the method of inquiry itself; but, Lonergan insists, new concerns, developments, and discoveries do not radically transform the method because they determine not a new goal, but rather new procedures and techniques for reaching the same goal.56 We encounter a similar relationship in the notion of basic horizon. There is one basic recurrent question underpinning the entire history of ideas—namely, the pure question (the unrestricted desire to know)—that generates the method, or structure, of basic horizon. There is a comprehensive preunderstanding (heuristic anticipation but not intuition) of all reality, or else the pure question could not be asked, because there is also a fundamental ignorance of reality, or else the pure question would not have to be asked.57 The pure question implies particular questions. Basic method implies particular methods. Basic horizon implies relative horizons. Identity in history implies difference.

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So also, if we now define a “unit-idea” in the “history of ideas” as the prior insight formulated by an heuristic concept, then in the history of an “idea” there will be found (or can be found) a certain identity amid diversity—a single horizon amid fluctuating perspectives, a constant orientation amid changing procedures, a single question amid differing interests.58 Hence, the intention of truth is the source both of continuity and of diversity in the history of ideas. It is the source of continuity because ideas, concepts, and judgments are answers to questions and a horizon is defined by the range of questions more so than by answers. It is the source of diversity because it challenges the adequacy of every idea, concept, and judgment. Continuity in the history of ideas is the foundation of a tradition that cuts across different ages—a fact that Skinner underplays—thereby allowing one to chart a course between the assertion of the relativity of truth and the positing of eternal truths. In this vein, Lonergan argues that truths are relative “to the context of a place and time; but such contexts are related to one another; history includes the study of such relations; in the light of history it becomes possible to transpose from one context to another; by such transpositions one reaches a truth that extends over places and times.” The historian of ideas, then, can legitimately consider human thought in terms of contexts, or sets of interwoven questions and answers, that mold a viewpoint around a central theme.59 The history of ideas, however, must be careful to trace the actual historical connection among ideas. In other words, it must deal with onÂ�going historical contexts.60 It must establish why ideas emerged, flowered, and declined. It must ask: to what extent is continuity the result of actual historical influences and to what extent is it the product of the recurrence of certain basic questions in historically unrelated situations?61 What is the interaction among distinct sets of ideas within the same historical period?62 It must also discriminate between the historical development of ideas—that is, the accumulation of insights and the exploration of new problems—and the occurrence of oversight, the distortion of meaning, and the loss of insight. In short, it must conduct a genetic and dialectical analysis. To execute these properly historical tasks it must cooperate with other disciplines to study the mutual interpenetration of ideas with social, political, and cultural trends. What, then, can we say about the respective roles of the history of ideas and of intellectual history and cultural history? How are we to delimit their respective spheres of inquiry? Cultural and intellectual historians, we have proposed, focus on general assumptions of an age—on trends, movements, and conflicts of thought that involve the interaction of various cultural and intellectual commu-


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nities, with technological, social, and political elements—thereby providing a pervasive background for the drama. The approach of the historian of ideas, by contrast, is thematic. He or she concentrates on particular issues, questions, and problems that may span diverse eras of cultural and intellectual history. The cultural historian, for example, may explore the Baroque or romanticism. The intellectual historian may inspect Scholasticism or the Enlightenment. The historian of ideas, on the other hand, will examine the idea of history, the idea of the great chain of being, the idea of perception, or the idea of authority.63 Underlying these sequences of questions and answers is a certain logical, and often historical, continuity in problems. Because the historian of ideas must be reasonably familiar with the nature of the problems themselves, his or her work is frequently undertaken as an adjunct to the study of particular issues in philosophy, social and political theory, science, and theology. By a thematic approach the historian of ideas can lend clarity and precision to cultural and intellectual history (especially when certain interests, concerns, and ideas dominate the attention of an age) and to specialized histories of such disciplines as science, philosophy, and theology. Arthur Lovejoy’s method of investigating “unit-ideas” and the logical connections among ideas, for example, presents intellectual historians with a powerful analytic tool, and it can assist philosophy in wrestling with salient problems by isolating recurrent issues.64 But to guard against the fatal temptation to be excessively abstract, logical, and atemporal, the historian of ideas must complement his or her work with an appreciation of cultural and intellectual history. General intellectual and cultural currents undoubtedly affect, influence, and condition the stream of questions and answers constitutive of the history of ideas. And even scholars engaged in an evaluative history of ideas, who are concerned primarily with the truth of ideas, must pay attention to the cultural and intellectual milieu, the intellectual biographies of thinkers, and the questions and insights that generate concepts if they are to eschew a dogmatic and simplistic attachment to concepts—the end products of thinking.

Intellectual History The subject matter of intellectual history, as we have been defining it, is what Lonergan variously calls the “intellectual climate of opinion,” “intellectual milieu,” “intellectual context,” or “intellectual atmosphere”—the fundamental ideas and assumptions of a period as articulated by theorists, scholars, philosophically sensitive artists, and such metaphysical poets as Rilke and Eliot.65 This is similar in substance to John Green’s claim that “the

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primary function of the intellectual historian is to delineate the presuppositions of thought in given historical epochs and to explain the changes which those presuppositions undergo from epoch to epoch.”66 We must discern the status of the Zeitgeist—its main carriers, its dynamic properties, its most crucial kind of presuppositions. To speak of the “fundamental assumptions of an age” is clearly to speak of the assumptions that stipulate common problems and concerns among intellectual disciplines. But the intellectual historian must ask whether the Zeitgeist is more of an ideal-type than of an actual description of historical reality. Some periods of history may display innovation, challenge to old premises, fragmentation, and confusion, whereas other periods may exhibit relative stability. Some cultures may tend toward uniformity, whereas other cultures may be pluralistic. Rather than divining cultural essences in the mode of German Idealism, it is the task of the intellectual historian to investigate the historically dynamic factors that account for the genesis, the transformation, and the demise of intellectual currents of thought. Yet—to call attention to Lonergan’s insistence of the utility of ideal-types—even when an interpretation of the basic presuppositions of the age is, and can only be, a highly abstract ideal-type, it can still serve as a very useful and critical device to explain intellectual movements.67 Although we cannot gainsay that technological, social, and political developments influence intellectual life a great deal—the printing press, the rise of the bourgeoisie in modern Europe, and the French Revolution all come readily to mind—we must affirm, if we are to follow Lonergan, that the most decisive factor in intellectual history is the pure desire to know operative in the concrete consciousness of concrete persons. The drive to understand is not located in some group mind, some collective mental substance; it is concretely present in the questions, insights, and judgments of individual thinkers. To be sure, when the ideas of a thinker become widely known, they enter the common world, become sedimented in a cultural tradition, and thereby begin to take on a “life of their own.” But the ideas of a thinker cannot be passed on throughout the ages without the constant effort of succeeding generations of individual persons interpreting the expressions of the author’s meaning. We are thus confronted with the ever-present phenomenon in intellectual history: a thinker being misinterpreted and misunderstood. We learn, for example, that Plato was not a Platonist, that Thomas Aquinas was not a Thomist, that Locke was not a Lockean, that Rousseau was not a Rousseauan, and that Marx was not a Marxist.68 We have seen that Lonergan’s hermeneutics would demand that an intellectual historian differentiate what a thinker actually meant from what contemporaries and successors thought he meant. To ascertain


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what an author meant, the historian must delve into the author’s biography, must have a keen appreciation of the intellectual climate in which he or she breathed, and must note the evidence of actual impact upon the author’s horizon from the ideas and questions of other thinkers.69 At the same time, the historian can trace the historical influence of an intellectual by observing his or her effect on language and on education, his or her legacy in the cultural tradition, his or her founding of schools, his or her molding of social attitudes and political opinions, and, most important, from the perspective of Lonergan’s horizon analysis, his or her posing of new questions, his or her opening up of new domains of inquiry, and his or her calling attention to new problems and ranges of experience. The great thinkers are those who transcend their inherited tradition, forming the nucleus of the creative minority, the spearhead of significant intellectual change. Thinkers of this rank may either clear entirely new intellectual paths (e.g., Plato, Descartes, Kant) or synthesize previous developments through masterful overriding insights (e.g., Aristotle, Aquinas).70 Creative geniuses in intellectual history, Lonergan admits, do not stand alone because the insights of countless lesser figures make the time ripe for the flowering of genius.71 Still, however propitious the time may be for a new orientation or a sweeping reorganization of thought, it nevertheless requires the mental force, the creative edge, the singular dedication of genius to exploit the situation. It is for this reason that intellectual historians can attain such a high caliber of explanatory power if they study periods delimited by the great thinkers.72 And yet—to keep in mind the dialectical relation of person and community—the investigation of intellectual history solely in terms of great individuals is bound to be insufficient. As we have just witnessed, the stage for the dramatic achievements of genius is a space that must have been cleared by the intellectual effort of numerous predecessors and fellow workers devoted to the serious play of the mind. In addition, the crossfertilization of ideas, the raising of questions, and the repercussions of discoveries can generate certain intellectual currents that define the general assumptions of the age; these assumptions, usually born by a combination of intellectual communities and sustained by social patterns and cultural styles, are probably unknown, or not very well known, by most contemporaries, even geniuses because, for the most part, they are taken for granted and function behind the scenes. Precisely because they direct, nourish, or impede inquiry, these pervasive assumptions deeply affect most contemporaries—even geniuses. Here the intellectual historian can profit by complementing studies of the great thinkers with studies of representative thinkers—those serious, but average, intellectuals who, precisely because

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of their average attainments, illustrate the general movement of the Zeitgeist. The genius, of course, may challenge the Zeitgeist with reflective awareness or may use the categories of the Zeitgeist as a springboard to leap to intellectual heights even heretofore beyond the reach of the dominant horizon; but, in either case, the genius will still be responding to the general assumptions of the age and, consequently, will be decisively influenced by them. Again, to contemplate the same generic topic from a slightly different angle, we can invoke Lonergan’s analogy of history as a battle—the course and outcome of which the participants are not aware.73 The historical interconnections among various thinkers and the historical links among intellectual communities can take twists and turns beyond the intentions and the anticipations of any of the thinkers involved, though the historical pattern does not evolve apart from the operations of the individual minds. We can conclude that the intellectual historian must consider not only the “great thinkers,” but a creative minority of individuals of varying talent implicated in an historical movement wider than any of them, and not only a creative minority but a Zeitgeist with its chorus of “representative thinkers.” The intellectual historian, however, must avoid two traps, both of which result from a forgetfulness of the desire to know as the central dynamism of history. First, fascination with the Zeitgeist must not lure the scholar to imagine that what counts in intellectual history is a head count of intellectuals. Perhaps at the turn of the twentieth century most intellectuals were positivists, and yet prominent intellectual historians have characterized the fin-de-siecle as the “revolt against positivism.”74 Why? Because the most significant intellectual trend, in their judgment, was an attack on the positivist Zeitgeist. The creative minority is indeed a minority—even among intellectuals—often a combatative minority, and frequently an embattled minority. Early modern scientists did not immediately conquer the redoubt of Aristotelian science in European universities, and many sought a haven in their own private societies. Far from exercising a quantitative superiority, the creative minority may actually shrink to a sole towering figure: a persecuted Socrates or an isolated Kierkegaard. Nor is its historical significance to be gauged entirely by its success in bringing to birth a new worldview—for it may fail. And even when successful, its triumphant march may be slow. Lonergan approvingly quotes William James’ remark about the career of a creative theory: First “it is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.”75 The hallmarks of the creative minority are its searching ques-


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tions and probing insights, its wrestling with fundamental assumptions, its breaking of new ground and drawing out of further implications. Thus it can foster the gestation, parturition, and development of a new Zeitgeist as the authority of the old worldview seeps away. This is not to say that the opponents of the creative minority may not offer intelligent, even biting, criticism because the assumptions being worked out by the creative minority may ultimately prove to be untenable; but the pure desire to know may demand that those assumptions be worked out, for only when they are worked out can their shaky foundations be exposed. Meanwhile, the opponents of the creative minority can formulate no viable sweeping alternative. Second, the threat of conventionalism and of relativism looms if a scholar concentrates principally, or ambiguously, on the objective pole of intellectual horizons, thereby underplaying the intentionality of human thought and the role of insight. Such a focus can be attractive to the scholar because he or she can obviously observe epochal shifts of worldviews in certain changing theories, conceptual systems, definitions, and axioms. This is no more evident than in the history of science. So Thomas Kuhn has forcefully argued that scientific development is not a piecemeal process by which facts, theories, and methods have been added “singly and in combination to the ever growing stockpile that constitutes scientific technique and knowledge.” Science, Kuhn holds, rather than showing steady progress, proceeds in terms of “revolutions,” the displacement of one conceptual and instrumental framework, or paradigm, by another framework. Five years before the publication of the first edition of Kuhn’s book, Lonergan came to the same conclusion. According to Lonergan, when a crisis in scientific (or mathematical) thought occurs—when existing theories and methods cannot satisfactorily handle the facts and the results of experimentation—then a fundamental revision of concepts, postulates, axioms, and methods ensues that leads to the germination of a radically new scientific structure.76 What needs to be emphasized here, lest one become enamored of the apparent relativity of reified horizons, is the subjective pole of horizons: the structure of cognitive operations underpinned by the desire to know. All scientific paradigms, for example, attain a degree of unity because they are products of the pursuit of scientific truth; they are grounded in the heuristic structure of scientific inquiry. Although empirical science, Lonergan maintains, does not reach definitive truth, it does converge upon truth, increasingly approximating it. Revolutions in science are implemented by insights—insights into the inadequacy of the old conceptual framework and insights into a new paradigm. The insights would include both direct insights (discoveries) and reflective insights

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that determine what constitutes sufficient evidence. They promote scientific advance, as Patrick Heelan notes, either by providing a more powerful explanatory account than a replaced framework (as Newton’s theory subsumed Kepler’s laws), or by creating a higher viewpoint that incorporates complementary scientific paradigms within a single horizon.77 What is basic to intellectual history is basic horizon, specified by its subjective pole of intentionality. Just as we must note that an individual horizon has its murky conglomerate world, its structural core, and its precarious embodiment of basic horizon, so we must acknowledge that the perspectives of an intellectual community will, or can, embrace an incidental component of ideas, a Zeitgeist, and a precarious attunement to basic horizon, which supplies the material for genetic (developmental) and dialectical (positions and counterpositions) analyses. The intellectual historian, then, cannot ignore the crucial role of the desire to know. But can the intellectual historian ignore either the all too common resistance to the desire to know? Muddled thinking, oversight, and warped ideas are blights on the landscape of intellectual life and thus must come under the scrutiny of an explanatory and evaluative intellectual history. Psychoneurosis, egoism, group bias, and common-sense shortsightedness can infect the tree of knowledge. The intellectual historian can indeed profit by a judicious application of the findings of psychohistory and the sociology of knowledge. A dominant minority of intellectuals, to use Toynbee’s term, can block new ideas and enforce its own world view upon the cultural superstructure by virtue of the power it wields and the prestige it holds in academic institutions and intellectual circles.78 The “success” of ideas surely can be much more a sociological matter than an intellectual matter. Resistance to theories in the natural sciences is usually occasioned by the fact that scientists have invested their intellectual capital in a particular viewpoint and are not prepared to declare themselves bankrupt. Lonergan commends Max Planc’s witticism that what makes a scientific theory accepted is not the clarity of observation, exactness of measurement, coherence of hypothesis, rigor of deduction, or decisiveness of verification, but the retirement of a present generation of professors.79 A much more pronounced resistance to new ideas, however, threatens developments in human science, in scholarship, in philosophy, and in theology, as well as in those scientific revolutions tied, at least on the surface, to controversial anthropological and theological implications. In human science, scholarship, philosophy, and theology, the image of human nature is directly at stake. Purely intellectual considerations, too, impede the progress of knowledge. These are nearly always philosophical counterpositions—inadequate


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statements on truth, objectivity, and reality (human, cosmic, and divine). Intellectual history has a unique contribution to render critical appropriation of the past because the general assumptions of an age are ultimately philosophical, even when they are explicitly antiphilosophical.80 This is to suggest that intellectual historians, if they are to go beyond mere doxiographical description, should be versed in philosophical ideas and trained in philosophical analysis. Still, a balanced and comprehensive treatment of the thought of an age requires an appreciation of the implicit philosophical orientations manifested in both intellectual and cultural life.81 Intellectual historians and cultural historians are therefore partners in discerning these philosophical assumptions. If, in the enterprise of articulating philosophical assumptions, the value of intellectual history, which grapples with the questions of science, metaphysics, political and social theory, and theology, resides in the relative lucidity and precision of the subject matter, the value in this project of cultural history, which focuses on the concerns of art, literature, manners, mores, and tastes, lies in the revealing character of its subject matter expressive of human interiority. Alfred North Whitehead’s perceptive comment on literature can be expanded to include the cultural infrastructure as a whole: “It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression. Accordingly it is to literature that we must look, particularly in its more concrete forms, namely in poetry and in drama, if we hope to discover the inward thoughts of a generation.”82 But is there an infinite regress of assumptions? The intellectual historian (and the cultural historian) must be able to search for the most substantive and compelling assumptions to execute this critical task. Lonergan contends that differences in metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of history, political and social philosophy, philosophical anthropology, and other fields of philosophy making ontological claims tend to be essentially differences in epistemology and in cognitional theory.83 The implication is clear: the intellectual historian can become more critical and more effective—can penetrate to the heart of a horizon and its assumptions—by explicating the dominant epistemological problems and premises.84 Informed by a solid understanding of epistemological controversies and presuppositions in a given era, the intellectual historian can be more successful in pinpointing the philosophical dynamics of the dominant intellectual and cultural concerns of the age. The method is empirical insofar as the historian must acquire a familiarity with the concrete details of cultural and intellectual life. It is philosophical insofar as the historian should be on the outlook for the salient philosophical motifs. And it is interdisciplinary insofar as intellectual and cultural historians can cooperate with scholars in other branches of history both to apprehend the technical, economic, and political setting

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of ideas and to trace the impact of philosophical ideas, explicit or implicit, on education, on social institutions, on public opinion, and on ruling elites. Explanatory intellectual history serves the critical mission of cosmopolis by uncovering the compelling philosophical assumptions operative in past intellectual cultures; it thereby sheds light on present intellectual assumptions by allowing for comparison and contrast and by indicating the historical origin of present perspectives. Evaluative intellectual history contributes to the same mission by encountering the past—by taking a stand on the truth of the crucial assumptions of the Zeitgeist of an historical period. Perhaps we can say that evaluative intellectual history—conforming to the principle that evaluation is mediated by explanation and description— carries out more thoroughly the investigation of substantive philosophical issues in intellectual culture, determining with exactitude ultimate presuppositions. Furthermore, dialectical analysis demonstrates what have been the irreconcilable worldviews—both contemporaneous and successive. Evaluative intellectual history also takes on the form of dramatic narrative, and necessarily so, for the search for meaning is at the center of the drama of existence. Particularly effective, and possibly a genre of historical and philosophical literature sui generis, would be an evaluative intellectual history in the mode of indirect communication. Rhetorically, it would be in a twilight area between explanatory history and evaluative history because it would neither pronounce explicit judgments on the truth of ideas nor would it eschew an interest in the task of evaluation: its judgments would come in the arrangements of themes, the juxtaposition of thinkers, and the quality of problems discussed. It would traverse beyond the pale of doxiographic description and explain intellectual movements; and in order to explain fully it would evaluate. However, its evaluation would be in that peculiar manner in which form becomes, or enters into, content. Such evaluative intellectual history in the mode of indirect communication would not be a program of surreptitiously inflicting dogmas, but it would join with other, more classical species—Platonic dialogues, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works, plays by existentialists—to promote, in its own unsurpassable way, a specifically philosophical endeavor: the precious task of posing the foundational questions of philosophy.

History of Philosophy There is, as we have implied in our discussion, a close link between intellectual history and the history of philosophy. The kind of interpretation we have been gleaning from Lonergan’s ideas achieves lucid formulation


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in A. O. Lovejoy’s observation that “in the history of philosophy is to be found the common seed plot, the locus of initial manifestations in writing, of the greater number of the more fundamental and pervasive ideas, and especially of the controlling preconceptions, which manifest themselves in other regions of intellectual history.”85 And is not intellectual history— at least an authentic intellectual history, which is faithful to the desire to know—philosophy in its existential sense, which is the love of wisdom? Surely it is. Yet, despite the intimate connection between intellectual history and the history of philosophy, the two are distinct. Intellectual history is broader in scope than philosophy in its systematic sense, and philosophy in its systematic aspect retains its own internal history. The “history of philosophy,” as we have been employing the term, is the history of philosophy as systematic joined to philosophy as existential. The aim of philosophy in this specific sense, for Lonergan, is nothing other than to objectify basic horizon, with its data being human interiority and its form of expression being predominantly theoretical. At the same time, it includes the existential style of writing that invites participation in the philosophical life and in the exploration of basic horizon. The play of technological, economic, political, and broad cultural and intellectual factors notwithstanding, the chief component in the history of philosophy is the intention of philosophical truth. Accordingly, the historian of philosophy must be primarily concerned, not with cataloging and pigeonholing philosophical sects, nor with recording mere novelties of view (since these activities could just as well be handled by descriptive cultural or intellectual historians), but with recounting genuine philosophical inquiry, genuine philosophical understanding of problems, and genuine philosophical knowledge.86 In view of the intrinsic philosophical dimension of intellectual history, critical intellectual history needs to draw upon the resources of such a specialized history of philosophy. Let us now consider the parameters of this specialized discipline. We must focus on what, for Lonergan, is the historicity of philosophical truth, bearing in mind that it is the historicity of philosophical truth that grounds a definite history of philosophy. When intellectual disciplines advance—Lonergan cites modern developments in mathematics, empirical science, depth psychology, and historical theory—new data are presented to the philosopher on the operations of the human mind, which, in turn, can stimulate new insights and breakthroughs in philosophical understanding. And any philosophical theory is open to such further clarifications and extensions.87 Philosophical questions also tend to be colored by, though not restricted to, the historical contexts, technical, social, and

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cultural, from whence they arise. For this reason, and to this extent, the historian of philosophy must be acquainted with the general historical background of philosophical inquiry.88 The possibility of intellectual advance means that an explanatory approach to the history of philosophy, rather than a merely descriptive approach, is both feasible and desirable. There are contexts of philosophical inquiry, networks of interlocking questions and answers; there can be development of philosophical understanding within contexts and beyond contexts by individuals and by philosophical communities. And such philosophical contexts can be related to each other in genetic sequences by the historian of philosophy. The historian can frequently apprehend interconnections, interdependencies, presuppositions, and the sense of questions better than the philosophers under examination. Nor are the implications, the fecundity, of a philosopher’s insights limited to his or her own horizon. The genuine philosopher submits to the norms of basic horizon, circumscribing the origin and goal of his inquiry, as does the genuine historian of philosophy, and herein, in Lonergan’s words, “is the ground for finding in any given philosophy, a significance that can extend beyond the philosopher’s horizon and, even in a manner he did not expect, pertain to the permanent development of the human mind.”89 The historicity of philosophical truth sets the task of critical scholarship to appropriate the philosophical past. The discipline of the history of philosophy entails both rigorous scholarship and philosophical commitment. Explanatory history of philosophy underscores the scholarly side; it is the devotion to historical truth, as W. von Leyden insists, that checks extravagant interpretations of the past.90 Yet the ultimate purpose of this historical scholarship is not to satisfy an idle curiosity, to engage in pedantry, or to indulge in antiquarianism; it is precisely to pursue the intention of philosophical truth—to grasp in a philosophy a significance that transcends the philosopher’s relative horizon. Evaluative historiography, as Lonergan conceives of it, underscores this requirement of the historian of philosophy that he or she assess the permanent contribution of a philosophical development, that he or she makes, according to W. H. Walsh, “judgments of intrinsic importance as well as judgments about what brought about what.”91 Thus, flowing out of the historicity of philosophy is the exigency for an encounter with the philosophical past: dialogue with the great philosophers, wrestling with the classic works of philosophy, appreciation of the ramifications of past insights, and rediscovery of old insights all become necessary elements in the quest for philosophical truth itself. Philosophy has its own internal history, and the history of philosophy is internal to philosophy.


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The march of philosophy, however, is not along a smooth path. Philosophies have been numerous, disparate, and contradictory.92 To be sure, psychoneurosis, egoism, group prejudice, commonâ•‚sense obscurantism, and ideological exploitation of metaphysical profundities can account for some of the divergence among purportedly philosophical views, and an evaluative philosophy of history must deal with them accordingly. But the poisoning of the love of wisdom by these corruptions is not the most essential, nor even the most perplexing, problem confronting the evaluative history of philosophy. For the kind of dialectical opposition among philosophical horizons that is of most concern is that which is internal to philosophy itself, namely, that which occurs in spite of fidelity to the intention of truth. “The philosophers,” as Lonergan remarks, “have been men of exceptional acumen and profundity.”93 Lonergan, of course, does not propose that the seeming scandal of a multiplicity of opposing philosophical worldviews puts a damper on evaluative history. Historians of philosophy will necessarily evaluate from the respective standpoints of their own philosophical perspectives, and a corresponding diversity of interpretations will result. Nevertheless such conflicts among historians of philosophy have the salutary effect of further clarifying basic philosophical issues. Indeed, Lonergan proposes his own path of evaluation. The genesis of philosophical error, in his view, is the great failure to differentiate the complexity of cognitional operations, usually tied to confusion between biological extroversion and human knowing. A basic dialectic, then, conspicuously emerges in the history of philosophy between philosophical positions, those statements coherent with the cognitional and existential performance of the “subject as subject” (the subject as conscious and performing prior to any objectification of that performance), and philosophical counterpositions, those philosophical statements incoherent with the cognitional and existential performance of the “subject as subject.”94 In positing such a sweeping dialectic in the history of philosophy, is Lonergan suggesting that the historian of philosophy should engage in pigeonholing philosophers into camps of truth and camps of error? Can the battle of philosophies play an ultimately positive role in the drama of philosophical understanding? An example Lonergan himself uses will illustrate his attitude toward these problems: Let us say that Cartesian dualism contains both a basic position and a basic counterâ•‚position. The basic position is the cogito, ergo sum and, as Descartes did not endow it with the clarity and precision that are to be desired, its further development is invited by such questions as, What is the self? What is thinking? What is being? What are the relations between

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Lonergan and Historiography them? On the other hand, the basic counterâ•‚position is the affirmation of the res extensa; it is real as a subdivision of the “already out there now”; its objectivity is a matter of extroversion; knowing is not a matter of inquiry and reflection. This counterâ•‚position invites reversal, not merely in virtue of its conjunction with the other component in Cartesian thought, but even when posited by itself in anyone’s thought. Thus, Hobbes overcame Cartesian dualism by granting reality to the res cogitans only if it were another instance of the res extensa, another instance of matter in motion. Hume overcame Hobbes by reducing all instances of the “already out there now real” to manifolds of impressions linked by mere habits and beliefs. The intelligence and reasonableness of Hume’s criticizing were obviously quite different from the knowledge he so successfully criticized. Might one not identify knowledge with the criticizing activity rather than the criticized materials? If so, Cartesian dualism is eliminated by another route. One is back at the thinking subject and, at the term of this reversal, one’s philosophy is enriched not only by a stronger affirmation of the basic position but also by an explicit negation of the basic counterâ•‚position.95

Hobbes and Hume—and, one might add, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel—the existentialists, and the phenomenologists, all of whom focused increasingly on the reality of the subject, gained insights into the inadequacy of the confrontation theory of truth as formulated by Descartes. Thus a sequence of philosophers who were laboring under the assumptions of a counterposition intelligently criticized those assumptions, helping to initiate their reversal in the history of modern philosophy. It is in light of such a reversal that Lonergan can issue the bold claim that “the historical series of philosophies would be regarded as a sequence of contributions to a single but complex goal.”96 Moreover, such philosophers as Descartes and Hume may, while expressing their findings as counterpositions, hit upon penetrating insights that enrich our knowledge of basic horizon.97 The evaluative historian of philosophy must separate the discovery from the framework in which it is embedded. If an evaluative history of philosophy were simply a matter of classifying philosophies into positions or counterpositions, then insights of momentous import would be neglected or insufficiently appreciated. We can see Lonergan practicing what he preaches in his own evaluation of Descartes. Lonergan rejects Descartes’ precept of universal doubt but then goes on to comment: Clearly enough, the implications of that precept fail to reveal the profound originality and enduring significance of Descartes, for whom universal doubt was not a school of scepticism but a philosophical programme


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that aimed to embrace the universe, to assign a clear and precise reason for everything, to exclude the influence of unacknowledged presuppositions. For that programme we have only praise, but we also believe that it should be disassociated from the method of universal doubt whether that method is interpreted rigorously or mitigated in a fashion that cannot avoid being arbitrary.98

The technical historian of philosophy can witness the unity of philosophy beneath the myriad conflicts of doctrine—the unity of program, aim, goal, and intention. And when philosophers are faithful to that intention, the historian can duly record them in the act of reversing even their own counterpositions. Lonergan indeed paints a rather sanguine picture of the history of philosophy. Errors, of course, abound throughout its history; but the drama of the history of philosophy seems, for him, to be more a comedy of errors than a tragedy. Still, the mood must become a more sober one if we are reminded of the repercussions of counterpositions in intellectual and cultural life, and, beyond that, of their resounding echo in the realm of pragmatic affairs. The reversal of counterpositions is the reversal of decline, which in the social world exacts a frightening toll of blood and misery. Lonergan warns that ethical counterpositions either “enforce their own reversal or destroy their carriers.”99 The history of philosophy is truly at the summit of critical scholarly selfâ•‚awareness: it pinpoints the most crucial intellectual assumptions in the most sophisticated and concentrated manner. The cutting edge of its critical blade must be brought to bear on the substantive issues in the history of thought by cooperation with other fields in the history of thought, just as critical history of thought must inform other historical disciplines to take the consequences of ideas seriously. We have in the present chapter extrapolated statements, indications, and hints from Lonergan’s writings about distinct fields in the history of thought and their methodological interdependence. To summarize: PsychoÂ�history surveys the impact of psychological factors on human understanding. Cultural history and intellectual history examine the Zeitgeist manifested respectively in the cultural infrastructure and in the cultural superstructure. The history of ideas approaches human thought thematically. The history of philosophy focuses upon the explicit and systematic search for philosophical truth. No one specialty can legitimately claim suzerainty over the others. And each field specialty can be divided into the functional specialties of “interpretation,” “history,” and “dialectics,” methodologically promoting objectivity. But psychohistory, cultural history, history of ideas, intellectual history, and history of philosophy can form

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a partnership in the critique of meaning that is decisive for their status as humanistic studies. In their cooperative venture, they can chronicle and assess the explosive conflicts of positions and counterpositions reverberating in the history of thought along a continuum ranging from the more affective to the more abstract and from the twilight of consciousness to the philosophically reflective. This, according to Lonergan, would have to be their fundamental critical role. For “human development,” he declares, “is largely through the resolution of conflicts and, within the realm of intentional consciousness, the basic conflicts are defined by the opposition of positions and counterâ•‚positions.”100 Thus the collaborative effort of these disciples would constitute—beyond either dry pedantry or instrumentalism—a contemporary academic praxis entering into the dynamic interplay of performance and interpretation.101

Chapter 4 History of Consciousness

It is the nemesis of all specializations to fail to see the woods for the trees, to evolve ad hoc solutions that are indeed specious yet profoundly miss the mark for the very reason that they aim too intently at a limited goal.

L o n e r gan’s rich “Dimensions of Meaning” is his most concentrated expression of a broad, philosophically informed perspective about the actual course of historical events. Of all his shorter writings, we may perhaps regard this one as a minor classic, an inexhaustible source of inquiry and meditative reflection.1 Here, Lonergan, in succinct but bold strokes, portrays the epochal transformations of consciousness and issues a forceful challenge to apply the Socratic enterprise of controlling meaning to the concrete circumstances of an age sensitive to the heuristics of scientific method and to the responsibilities of historical existence. Inevitably, these observations point back to the precision of Lonergan’s cognitional theory in Insight and forward to his concept of stages of meaning in Method in Theology. Indeed they also stimulate wide-ranging inquiry into the philosophy of history as they provide a springboard to all of Lonergan’s works dealing with the topic of historical existence. Our concern in this chapter is to illuminate the nature, limits, and efficacy of a philosophical history as Lonergan views it in “Dimensions of Meaning” and other key works. If the hermeneutical circle pertains to history, then we cannot know the whole of history without knowing the parts and we cannot know the parts without knowing the whole. But clearly there are enormous, insurmountable obstacles to knowing the whole. History, of course, has not ended, whatever that would mean. In addition, vast stretches of data about the past are missing. And even if, miraculously, we 111

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could see all of history from the beginning to the end (which may be the beginning), even if we could gather all the data, we would still be faced with the Herculean task of interpreting it. This burden would be even more prodigious if historical existence were not a purely world-immanent process but were rather situated at the intersection of time and the timeless. Indeed, in our venture to grasp the whole of history, we are confronted with irreducible mystery (toward the upper limit of the continuum of meaning and mystery). Thus, as Lonergan puts it, general history—the total view of history—is just an ideal.2 Nevertheless, do we not have the exigency to comprehend the whole as much as is reasonably possible, within the boundaries established above, to illuminate the parts? This project of navigating between obscurantism and gnosticism invariably entails philosophical considerations and, consequently, opens up the prospect of a philosophical history. If we are careful to purge the term of any association with gnostic construction on the meaning of history, we may hesitatingly call such a philosophical history a “speculative philosophy of history.” Still, how can we unite the seemingly antithetical: philosophical “speculation” and empirical historical inquiry? It is the contention of this chapter that the methodology of Lonergan offers the most substantive philosophical foundation for such an endeavor. Let us first, however briefly, locate Lonergan’s speculative philosophy of history within the discernible topography of his philosophy of history as a whole. Historical existence is the drama of the search for meaning and the quest for value. It is a journey with both movement and countermovement. The drama extends from the unconscious depths of matter to the spiritual heights of the cloud of unknowing. It includes the bright prominence, sinking into unfathomable depths, of the spiritual, moral, and intellectual drama of each person: as actor and critic, performing and interpreting; as limited by biological, psychic, geographical, social, and historical conditions, while, simultaneously, self-transcending, responding to the challenges of the environment and of the past; as living the tension of limitation and transcendence faithfully or unfaithfully, accepting or fleeing the call of the desire to know and the intention of the good; as performing the drama before the self, others, and the Wholly Other. There is, then, to this drama, the movement of authenticity and the countermovement of inauthenticity: the gaining and the losing of the direction of life. The drama also embraces a creative minority of prophets, saints, sages, philosophers, and statesmen, as well as the mystery of destinyÂ�— the collective drama of a community, of a civilization, of the human race which cannot simply be reduced to an aggregate of individual wills.3 And the drama likewise witnesses, individually and collectively, the human re-

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sponse of inquiry to the abiding presence of the nothingness and mystery of unrestricted, divine love. Hence, extrapolating from Lonergan’s writings, we can fashion an ontological philosophy of history, a systematic reflection on the intrinsically historical character of human being, which was outlined in chapter 1. Still, do not the immanent norms of lived history—the imperatives inherent in the directional tendency of the odyssey of existence—command that, under appropriate historical conditions, a philosophically perceptive and historically minded cultural superstructure foster a more decisive assumption of historical responsibility? At least this seems to be the ultimate implication of the Socratic enterprise from the hindsight of more than two millennia. Critical historical scholarship would participate in the drama of history itself by entering into the dynamics of performance and interpretation. And thus an ontological philosophy of history necessarily passes over to an epistemological philosophy of history. Lonergan’s distinction of hermeneutics, explanatory history, and evaluative history—as the functional specialties, respectively, of “interpretation,” “history,” and “dialectics”—must therefore be viewed in this light. The fact that they are functional specialties means that they are collaborative partners in a larger enterprise that can overcome the nemesis of specialization, as quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Lonergan’s notion of the functional correlation of scholarship, philosophy, theology, and social policy is aimed precisely at that nemesis. What ties together the various functional specialties is, in fact, the historicity of the cultural superstructure itself. Lonergan is simply explicating how these specialties cooperate in an ongoing appropriation of tradition, which is a threefold critical venture of encounter with the past, search for philosophical foundations in the present, and development of salient themes to meet the challenge of the future. At the same time, as discussed in chapter 3, Lonergan’s nuanced study of the human mind establishes the rudiments of a methodological cooperation among distinct fields in the history of thought. Psychohistory, cultural history, the history of ideas, intellectual history, and the history of philosophy all can constitute a partnership in the critique of meaning because they all consider, along a continuum ranging from the incipient to the explicit, the philosophical assumptions that inform human living. But, as the content of “Dimensions of Meaning” illustrates, collaboration toward a wider goal can also be achieved in a material, and not just formal, manner through a world history of thought. The growing awareness of historicity is itself a major theme in the drama of history. Still, do we dare utter this without conjuring up the ghosts of Hegel and his like to haunt the groves of academe?

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Identifying the Discipline If the historian of thought is to be faithful to the task of explaining major historical developments in human thinking, then he or she must consider those monumental developments that are truly transformations of the most fundamental assumptions regarding reality and what it means to be human. To be sure, the magnitude of such a study of the world history of thought is awesome. In addition to the problem of scarcity of evidence for the premodern period, there is the difficulty of digesting the sources that are available. And is not this difficulty largely a matter of arriving at a proper philosophical framework to interpret the data? Philosophical issues inevitably intrude upon this type of historiography. They are particularly decisive in meeting the problem of defining an epoch, which is an ever-present problem confronting the historian, but one that takes on staggering proportions when attempting to delineate the great epochs in the history of thought. What is consciousness? What is myth? What are the interrelationships among different modes of understanding? Does science completely replace philosophy? Does philosophy (or science) absolutely render myth obsolete? It is precisely because such philosophical questions necessarily inform investigations of the epochal changes in the history of thought that we must, in this unique case, speak of a philosophical history. We enter here the terrain of a speculative philosophy of history in the specific sense mentioned earlier. A speculative philosophy of history, as argued just above (and in the section on “the universal viewpoint” in chapter 1), need not be a universal history that purports to explain, in actual historical detail, the true meaning or the essence of history. Nor, according to Lonergan, should it be. The drama of history is a venture into the known unknown. The immanent intelligibility of emerging world process (“finality”) is open-ended. In our search for meaning and quest for value we know we have a role: the role of inquirer—inquiry precisely about the role itself. And no self-luminous jump in comprehension of the role ends the mystery of the play. Generic insights can spawn differences in the history of self-interpretation—leaps in self-understanding—but they do not eliminate the identity amid difference: the identity of the search and the quest. Moreover, authenticity demands that, at every point of historical life, openness to transcendent mystery be preserved. The in-between character of history suggests, as Voegelin has come to articulate it, that there are lines of meaning “in history” that are not temporal: they exhibit what Lonergan calls “vertical finality.”4 So we hear the echoes of Ranke’s famous dictum that every age is equal before God. The “meaning of history,” then, cannot be captured in a


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timeline leading up to the self-consciousness of Absolute Spirit, as Hegel formulated it in his speculative system, or as Marx reformulated it in his materialist inversion of Hegel’s dialectical philosophy of history. Nor can it be reduced to an ascending spiral of spiritual progress, as in the Liberal Anglican interpretation. Nor can its meaning be fixed by sets of scientific laws explaining the course of civilization, as in the Victorian history of Thomas Buckle. Lonergan’s ontological philosophy of history, therefore, precludes a speculative philosophy of history that would aspire to an a priori description of historical reality. But Lonergan’s critique of historical reason does not view a philosophically grounded explanatory framework as necessarily antithetical to the aims of open-minded scientific history, any more than it views an evaluative philosophically inspired historical analysis as running counter to the requirements of historical objectivity. A properly validated philosophical theory—one that is rooted in self-appropriation and expressed as critical realism (which is a “position” reflective of cognitive performance)—can even broaden historical knowledge and facilitate its development. Indeed, a philosophical theory about the course of actual historical events can possess at least the utility of a grand-scale ideal-type.5 The legitimate function of such a restricted speculative philosophy of history would be to guide historical research rather than to describe historical reality. In so doing it would be faithful to the important criterion spelled out by W. H. Walsh for preserving historical objectivity. Such a philosophical theory of history would not predetermine the data, preestablishing what we see; it would instead assist us in interpreting the data serving to predispose how we would see things.6 Given, then, the legitimacy and the imperative for a speculative philosophy of history in this restricted sense, and given the exigency, from LonÂ� ergan’s perspective, that the philosophical framework be in accord with the positions of critical realism, what is the exact model that would direct historians? And what is the relation of the model to historical research, historical explanation, and historical narration? Lonergan hints at three contenders for such a model.7 The first is Arnold Toynbee, whose A Study of History is an erudite source book of grand-scale ideal-types with a narrative, chronological focus. Toynbee’s explanatory categories define civilizations as the basic units of history, trace their patterns of origin, development, breakdown, decline, and decay, and elucidate their most significant types of contacts with each other in space and time. He identifies religion as the main carrier of human aspiration beyond the rise and fall of civilizations. A central category of his—the very dynamism behind the rise and fall of civilizations—is the process of challenge and

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response, the discussion of which is augmented by a set of humanistic categories drawn from Greek tragedy, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Goethe.8 Although Toynbee has an “intellectual evasiveness,” as Voegelin characterizes it, about the criteria for evaluating the religious carriers of higher human striving, his ideal-type of challenge and response, amid the potpourri of his humanistic descriptions, remains a powerful heuristic tool, which ties in brilliantly with Lonergan’s theory of progress and decline.9 But Toynbee offers no adequate foundation for a speculative philosophy of history that would differentiate the salient epochs of the history of thought. Another candidate is Pitirim Sorokin in his Social and Cultural Dynamics. If Toynbee has implicitly located the desire to know—the élan of cognitional process—as the substance of progress, Sorokin has implicitly recognized levels of cognitional structure as the key to cultural advance. He holds, for instance, that the senses and reason (as well as moral and religious “intuition”) are legitimate and necessary avenues to truth.10 Sorokin’s vast work, which stresses architecture, painting, and poetry, but embraces all fields of culture, depicts cycles in Western civilization from the Greeks to the contemporary age. Although they are devoid of any analogy with the necessary life phases of a biological organism, these cycles consist of oscillating phases of three basic types of culture: “sensate,” “ideational,” and “idealistic,” to use his terms.11 “Sensate” culture he defines as one in which the fundamental criterion of truth is sensation. “Ideational” culture is one in which the ultimate authority of truth is religious experience, inspiration, or revelation. “Idealistic” culture is one in which the emphasis falls on reason as the arbiter of truth, operating with respect to both sensation and faith. If Sorokin’s schema of “sensate,” “idealistic,” and “ideational” types bears a rough similarity to Kierkegaard’s three spheres of existential subjectivity—respectively, the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious— then, Lonergan maintains, they can also be correlated with personal selfappropriation of the cognitional levels of experiencing, understanding, and judging.12 By using Sorokin’s material, Lonergan suggests, one can prolong personal appropriation qua experiencing, qua understanding, and qua judging (and, the later Lonergan would add, qua deciding and loving) into a study of the development of culture. In fact, the typology adds considerable precision to the store of ideal-types at the disposal of a speculative philosophy of history. Sorokin himself proposes that his typology carries much greater explanatory clout than what he regards as Toynbee’s somewhat dilettantish and even inconsistent discussion of the growth and the decline of civilizations.13 Sorokin, for example, finds that the traits Toynbee ascribes to civilizations in their phase of growth are those most


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associated with the spiritual ideational “super-system” of the civilization, whereas many of those traits Toynbee attributes to a civilization in decline are those of a civilization either dominated by its empiricist and hedonist sensate “super-system” or in transition from such domination.14 Again, however, we must conclude: whatever promise Sorokin’s ideal-types may hold for a critical history of culture, they do not suffice in and of themselves to account for radical horizon shifts whose significance extends to more than one culture. They must be incorporated within some larger theoretical context that would serve as the adequate foundation for a speculative philosophy of history, although such a larger context would be all the richer and efficacious for having these ideal-types at its command. The closest approximation to the model we are seeking is Voegelin’s prodigious Order and History, which, backed by an impressive array of primary and secondary sources and attentive to concrete historical detail abundantly spread over diverse civilizations and millennia, introduces the key concept of a movement from compactness to differentiation.15 The constant structure of experience permeating the historical field analyzed by Voegelin is “the Question”—the process of inquiry whose objectives are the true, the good, and the divine, not a set of “objects” in the “external world.” The experience of questioning is itself the true “constituent of humanity”; and “the range of human experience is always present in the fullness of its dimensions.” The identity in history is the structure of experience, the process of questioning. Yet there is a significant, epochal variation effected by the Question itself, an existential breakthrough, a veritable “leap in being” that nevertheless does not, and cannot, eliminate the Question: namely, differentiating insights into the increasingly self-luminous structure of the Question by representative prophets, philosophers, and saints.16 Voegelin’s history of symbols with its principle of “differentiation of consciousness” not only provides a striking illustration of a model for a speculative philosophy of history, thereby addressing our first query, but it likewise sheds light on the topic of the second question, which regards the connection between the model and ordinary historical research, explanation, and narration. Above all else, Voegelin in his evaluative history mediates his philosophical analysis by judicious selection of relevant sources and by intense concern for historical accuracy. Winding his way through Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Israelite, Hellenic, Chinese, and Roman civilizations, he is keenly sensitive to concrete historical detail and to developing situations. As he encounters the myths of the PaleoOriental societies, the prophets of Israel, the apostles and saints of Christianity, the sages of China, and the philosophers of Hellas, he is scrupulous in focusing on the primary texts. He cultivates in the first three volumes

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a dramatic narrative style suitable to telling the tale of the two major differentiations of consciousness, “noetic” (the symbolic form of Philosophy) and “pneumatic” (the symbolic form of Revelation). And when new questions, new evidence, or new interpretations arise, he is resolute in revising, in correcting, and in expanding his study, as when he gave a dramatic reinterpretation and redirection of the entire program at the beginning of volume 4 of Order and History. The example of Voegelin’s magnum opus, then, highlights two components of a speculative philosophy of history. We are reminded here of Max Weber’s division of historical analysis into, first, a “developmental level” of long-term trends concerned with explicating the genesis and course of historical configurations formulated as ideal-types, and, second, a “situational level” devoted to explaining events by virtue of concrete circumstances and contingencies.17 Lonergan, we should recall from chapter 2, speaks of an “upper blade” and of a “lower blade” of interpretation, corresponding, respectively, with Weber’s “developmental level” and his “situational level.” Both components are essential for a legitimate and objective speculative philosophy of history. The “upper blade” of the speculative philosophy of history is a philosophical framework that generates, inspires, guides, revises, and synthesizes grand-scale historical interpretations. Derived from models of the structures of consciousness fashioned by Lonergan’s ontological philosophy of history, its ultimate origin is the personal act of self-appropriation, the root of all legitimate species of the philosophy of history. Its status, as determined by a critique of historical reason, is that of a unique ideal-type, a set of generalities demanding specific determination, with the actual determination to be worked out by existing methods of scholarship. Hence, it is not a positivist technique geared toward arriving at abstractions that would mutilate the individuality and the uniqueness of historical events. It is a developmental theory, a grand-scale ideal-type, expressing transcultural configurations of human living. Although the ultimate source of the theory is self-appropriation, its basic terms and relations are evidenced in the expansive panorama of history; they are not artificial constructions pulled out of a hat because, as Lonergan remarks, “there has been for millennia a vast multitude of individuals in whom such basic nests of terms and relations can be verified.”18 The theory links together transcultural configurations and patterns of human living by tracing a temporal sequence among them—a general tendency of development. Indeed, although Lonergan does not employ the name, we can designate the developmental aspect of his speculative philosophy of history, properly speaking, as the “history of consciousness.”


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The key to the developmental theory is the notion of differentiation of consciousness.19 The orientation of the stream of consciousness specifies the objects of consciousness, with different orientations constituting diverse patterns of experience, corresponding realms of meaning, and parallel modes of expression. All the while, however, the intentionality of consciousness also specifies the total range of meaningful objects (the world) and the horizon of a person or of a community; thus, a radical alteration in the orientation of consciousness inaugurates a profound change in the understanding of the world and in the horizon or perspective through which a person or a community apprehends reality. Radical horizon shifts can likewise entail fundamental transformations of self-interpretation, of understanding basic horizon, and of grasping human historicity. Now such horizon shifts revolve around differentiations of consciousness— watershed marks in the differentiation of patterns of experience attended by differentiation of correlative realms of meaning and modes of expression. Lonergan posits two epochal horizon shifts. The first involves the emergence of distinct patterns of experience out of a relative homogeneous unity: the coming of age of the pure intellectual pattern differentiates the theoretical realm of meaning and its technical language, whereas a heightened intensity of religious consciousness differentiates the realm of transcendence and scriptural, theological, or mystical language. The second great transformation in the history of consciousness witnesses methodical self-reflection, disclosing the realm of interiority and spawning a language expressive of the appropriation of subjectivity and historicity. The three ages delimited by these epochal breakthroughs, we must caution, do not exhaust or reveal the meaning of history; the veil of the mystery of existence is not torn asunder by these models of the history of consciousness; and hence the history of consciousness must not be confused with neoÂ� gnostic constructions of three stages of history, whether Joachite, Positivist, Idealist, or Marxist. The developmental theory is also not sufficient to explain the history of consciousness. The “upper blade” of interpretation must be fused with a “lower blade” that cuts into the fabrics of history, anthropology, archeology, philology, and related fields to account for concrete details, unique events, representative persons, and contingent circumstances. Scholarly disciplines must supply the data of the history of consciousness, and the data must be interpreted within the methodological framework of the developmental theory. Just as the laws of physics are the fruit of an interaction between mathematics and data, so the history of consciousness must be an ongoing process with “one foot in a transcendental base and the other in an increasingly organized data.” Neither purely a priori nor purely a

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posteriori, the history of consciousness is nourished by the constant crossfertilization, correction, and refinement of the theoretical construct; the construct, in turn, facilitates selecting, exploring, and understanding the data.20 Although it is dependent on other historical fields, the history of consciousness can, at the same time, stimulate them to pose new questions as they view historical trends anew from the perspective of substantive transformations of basic cultural and intellectual assumptions. Insofar as the history of consciousness could avoid narrow overspecialization—the bane and curse of academic pedantry—as well as the intoxication of a gnostic universal history, it would, we propose, be a legitimate discipline in its own right. And through the ongoing collaboration of specialists, the brilliant pioneering enterprise of a Voegelin could be supplemented by a permanent program of serious, if less magisterial, efforts. We have briefly touched upon Lonergan’s broad conception of the history of consciousness. But form is illustrated by content to a unique degree in an historical discipline that is a speculative philosophy of history. Our present task must be to illustrate more amply the nature, scope, and context of the history of consciousness and the utility of Lonergan’s categories.21 We can only accomplish this—and here we plough new ground in the treatment of Lonergan’s reflection on the history of thought—if we gather together in some coherent historical portrait Lonergan’s discussion of the material content of the history of consciousness, supplementing his ideas with historical analyses we judge to be consonant with his approach and demonstrative of the fecundity of his models. Here, we witness the historicity of philosophical truth, for Lonergan’s historical interpretation influences, as it is influenced by, his philosophical premises.

The Age of Myth The Age of Myth is an age of undifferentiated, compact, or homogeneous consciousness, where self and community, subject and object, discrete modes of understanding (subjective pole), various elements of reality (objective pole), and forms of expression tend not to be distinguished.22 In undifferentiated consciousness, the sense of community seems more dominant than the awareness of self as a center of psychic activity. Lacking personal differentiation, an “emotional identification”—Lonergan uses Scheler’s term here—of the individual with the collectivity is pervasive, and affective appreciation of self is almost exclusively in terms of participation in group life.23 We can plausibly infer that intersubjective communication of feeling will have a greater intensity than in more differentiated societies. And we can reasonably inquire whether many symbols, which


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in the modern world are restricted to dreams, will appear in the waking consciousness of “primitives.”24 Moreover, images pertaining to what modern secular culture regards, perhaps with some confusion, as the “psychological sphere,” will blend indiscriminately with aesthetic and religious motifs and with symbolic expressions representing the mystery of the human condition. Let us now consider the subjective pole of what we can postulate as “pure” undifferentiated consciousness. In the subjective pole, patterns of experience blend and mix, with none attaining a relative autonomy and sharp distinctness from the others. As Gerardus van der Leeuw alleges, for the “primitive mind” there are indeed various motives and criteria, but they are not purposely differentiated. Art, for example, cannot be separated from religion and practical concerns. So Jacquetta Hawkes, commenting on the dispute over whether the Stone Age cave paintings exhibited a purely aesthetic, a religious, or a magico-practical interest, can remark that “in primitive societies, where there is no conscious division between intellectual, aesthetic, practical, and religious activities, art belongs to them all and is simply a part of everyday life. To try to separate it out only reveals the folly of the over-analytical and unimaginative mind.” Van der Leeuw argues that the arts in primitive cultures radiate around the dance as their unifying center; so much so, in fact, that, as he phrases it, prehistory is mostly dance history.25 Lonergan hints at the significance of dance in undifferentiated culture when he mentions the expressive function of mimesis: insight can use the pattern discerned in a schematic image to guide bodily movements, and hence bodily movements can signify other movements.26 Religion penetrates all aspects of life in undifferentiated consciousness. Because of this fact, it does not clearly delineate and map out its own distinct realm. Undifferentiated consciousness, according to Lonergan, “is only puzzled or amused by the oracles of religiously differentiated consciousness.”27 Lonergan, however, seems to admit an exception to the rule in the figure of the shaman, who, specializing in “archaic techniques of ecstasy,” can attain a rudimentary state of mystical awareness.28 Still, the role of the shaman in primitive societies is not purely religious, for it has unmistakable magical, social, and political overtones. To say that a culture is undifferentiated is not to say that its mentality is prelogical. Practical intelligence is obviously operative when “primitives” acquire, as they do, a thorough understanding of the practical tasks of daily life in their own society. It is highly visible in the discoveries of the Neolithic Revolution and even more so in the sophisticated and dazzling inventiveness of the Urban Revolution, which established “civilization,”

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a civil order with a significant differentiation of social roles and tasks and the formation of distinct social communities, challenging the spontaneity of intersubjectivity. To be sure, with the Neolithic Revolution and the Urban Revolution practical intelligence seemed to have come into its own, revealing a substantial differentiation of the practical pattern of experience; but, in both cases, Lonergan thinks the basic orientation remained, on balance, still undifferentiated: Moreover it is the development of practical understanding that takes men beyond fruit-collecting, hunting, fishing, gardening to large-scale agriculture with the social organization of the temple states and later of the empires and the ancient high civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Crete, the valleys of the Indus and the Huang-ho, Mexico, and Peru. There emerged great works of irrigation, vast structures of stone or brick, armies and navies, complicated processes of book-keeping, the beginning of geometry, arithmetic, astronomy. But if the poverty and weakness of the primitive were replaced by the wealth and power of great states, if the area over which man exercised practical intelligence increased enormously, the whole achievement stood upon the cosmological myth that depicted as continuous and solidary the order of society, the order of the cosmos, and the divine being.29

Nor is there completely lacking a theoretical or speculative concern. Lonergan would seem to have no quarrel with the contention, advanced by Paul Radin and others, that “primitive man” could grasp abstract ideas and concepts. Lonergan, for example, recognizes that “primitives” can devise elaborate classification systems.30 Nevertheless, this is not to argue that theoretic intelligence has attained hegemony in its own distinct realm. Thus, Lonergan describes “primitive” apprehension of meaning as “rudimentary” and its expression of theoretic meaning as “vague.” The person with undifferentiated consciousness “does not,” in Lonergan’s words, formulate a theoretical Ideal in terms of knowledge, truth, reality, causality. He does not formulate linguistically a set of norms for the pursuit of that ideal goal. He does not initiate a distinct economic and social and cultural context within which the pursuit of the ideal goal could be carried out by human animals.31

The objective pole of the horizon of undifferentiated consciousness is similarly compact. As we might anticipate, realms of meaning (the aesthetic, the practical, the religious, the scientific, the philosophical, the symbolic, the psychological) overlap. But the compactness extends to the perception


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of the components of reality. Such scholars as Voegelin, Henri Frankfort, and John Wilson have pointed out how, for the archaic view, reality is composed of four “elements”: the sacred, the world, society, and “man.” And although these elements are in one sense apprehended as distinct, being graded in a hierarchy according to their durability and lastingness (with the sacred ranking highest to be followed, in descending order, by the world, society, and “man”), they are in another crucial sense not differentiated. The Egyptologist, Wilson, has coined the term “consubstantiality” to refer to the Egyptian view of the universe as composed of a continuing substance diffused throughout “a spectrum in which one colour blends off into another without line of demarcation, in which, indeed, one colour may become another under alternating conditions.”32 Voegelin has vividly captured in his moving and telling description the essentials of the worldview of undifferentiated consciousness: The community of being is experienced with such intimacy that the consubstantiality of the partners will override the separateness of subÂ�stances. We move in a charmed community where everything that meets us has force and will and feelings, where animals and plants can be men and gods, where men can be divine and gods are kings, where the feathery morning star is the falcon Horus and the Sun and the Moon are his eyes, where the underground sameness of being is a conductor for magic currents of good and evil forces that will subterraneously reach the superficially unreachable partner, where things are the same and not the same, and can change into each other.33

In the archaic worldview, the ordering force of cosmic-divine substance is infused into social and individual life through the mediation of a shaman, a king, or a pharaoh. The expression of meaning is likewise compact. Meaning is communicated through intersubjectivity, mimesis, art, ritual, and symbol—all of these falling within the covering framework of ordinary, commonsense language. Thus, Lonergan can maintain that undifferentiated consciousness develops in the manner of common sense. Now “the realm of common sense is the realm of persons and things in their relation to us.”34 This means that the language of undifferentiated consciousness expresses insights that are closely tied to human sentiments, attitudes, interests, concerns, and feelings and to gestures, percepts, and images. Indeed, they are so intimately connected with elementary experience that early language can, as a general rule, express only what can be pointed to, perceived, or imagined; in particular, therefore, it has serious problems in expressing the generic, the temporal, the subjective, and the divine. Homer, Lonergan

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observes, has no generic word for seeing but only words for such specific activities as glancing, peering, and staring. Some American Indian languages have no generic word for sickness.35 Again, time, which involves a synthesis that orders all events into a single continuum of earlier and later, cannot be directly perceived; it can be represented only by a highly sophisticated geometrical image. The expression of such an image, Lonergan argues, strains the capacity of the language of undifferentiated consciousness. Accordingly, many primitive languages have tenses that express kinds or modes of action rather than a synthesis of temporal relationships. Lonergan also cites abundant evidence of how early language stumbles in representing subjectivity: possessive pronouns, for instance, develop before personal pronouns; Homer portrays inner mental processes as personified interchanges; the Hebrews experience moral defect as defilement and later as the people’s violation of the covenant with God. Finally, undifferentiated consciousness regales in hierophanies. This it can do, explains Lonergan, by associating the divine with the objects, events, rituals, or recitations that occasion religious experience, even though the divine, the object of transcendental intentionality, strictly speaking, can neither be perceived nor imagined.36 Because the insights conveyed by ordinary language are intimately bound up with images and feelings, undifferentiated common sense is also enveloped by symbols (images tinged with affects). And, if we mean by myth the complex of symbols and their associations of speech, song, and ritual, then surely the age of undifferentiated consciousness is an age dominated by myth. The apprehension of human beings and their world is laden with symbols “expressed in myth, saga, legend, magic, cosmogony, apocalypse, typology.” Ideas are principally communicated through “rituals, narrative forms, titles, parables, metaphors.”37 This domination of undifferentiated consciousness by image, symbol, and myth has its truly salutary aspects. We are not using “myth” here in an essentially pejorative sense. Myth represents the unity of reality—of person, society, world, and transcendent mystery. Hence, undifferentiated consciousness is present to the full range of human experience. Although lacking the depth of differentiated consciousness, it is not saddled with the temptation of reductionism, either spiritualist or materialist; and it is thereby less in danger of losing a comprehensive view of existence.38 We must be careful not to restrict myth and undifferentiated consciousness to the Age of Myth. Myth does not cease to have a legitimate truth function after the advent of philosophy and science, for it is a representation of the paradoxical known unknown. Thus it is imperative for scholars to ascertain the exact status of myth and symbolic consciousness through-


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out the history of consciousness. At a minimum, we would suggest, they must distinguish among myths (a) in the period of pure undifferentiated consciousness, (b) after the Neolithic Revolution, (c) after the Urban Revolution, when literature became differentiated, (d) during the state of protophilosophical speculation (the Memphite Theology, Hesiod, Hebrew Wisdom Literature), (e) after the emergence of philosophy, and (f) after the shift to modern science, historical consciousness, and interiority. Moreover, undifferentiated consciousness does not disappear from history after the arrival of differentiated consciousness because large segments of a culture may have undifferentiated consciousness although the creative edge of the culture has reached a stage of differentiated consciousness. It will prove helpful, then, to distinguish undifferentiated consciousness (a) in a pure state, (b) after the Neolithic Revolution, (c) after the Urban Revolution, (d) during the stage of protophilosophical speculation, (e) after the emergence of philosophy, and (f) after the shift to modern science, historical consciousness, and interiority.39 We must conclude that there will be a tension—an antagonism—between undifferentiated and differentiated consciousness when the Age of Myth comes to an end for a given culture. The domination of undifferentiated consciousness by image, symbol, and myth indeed has severe drawbacks.40 The most fundamental and pervasive problem is minimal self-knowledge. How can this be avoided if human beings, untutored by philosophy or by higher spirituality, do not adequately differentiate themselves from society, the world, and the sacred? They interpret themselves solely as a known unknown.41 Consequently, awareness of the capacity of the mind and of human responsibility is restricted. Basic horizon is understood entirely through the obscurity of symbols, rites, and mythical narration. Recognition of human historicity is only implicit, subliminal, subsidiary, incipient. Neither temporality nor subjectivity nor transcendence can be represented adequately. Interior experience must be transferred onto the field of the perceived or the imagined to make rudimentary insight into such experience possible. So noetic process and religious experience are “projected” onto the canvas of the world as they are pictured by undifferentiated consciousness. Perhaps projection is not the most judicious term to employ because it stems from the vocabulary of naive realism. It might be more accurate to say, as Dennis Klein suggests, that subjective and objective poles are not differentiated.42 Inadequate self-knowledge generates, in turn, native bewilderment about the criteria of truth, reality, objectivity, and causality. Undifferentiated consciousness lacks “the techniques of mastery and control that the study of grammar imparts to the use of words and the study of logic to the communication of thought.”43 When the distinction among words, the

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meaning of words, and the reality meant by words is blurred, confusion is legion: the real attains the stability of reality only by being imagined or by being named; differences in image and in name can result in an acknowledgment of different realities; the power to name things implies the power to control things, a misconception of causality bred through the uncritical admixture of practical insights, linguistic expressions of those insights, and the practical results effected by decisions, which confusion engenders the magical conceit that words produce their own results by a power of their own which myth explains.44 The criterion of objectivity becomes simply “a sufficiently integrated and a sufficiently intense flow of sensitive representations, feelings, words, and actions.” Experiencing, understanding, and judging, of course, occur—â•œÂ�primitives” are not inherently stupid—but there is no distinction among these levels of consciousness. Not only is adequate self-understanding precluded for the “primitive,” but the difficulty of accurately discriminating between experiencing and understanding means that the “primitive” is “fettered by his inability to conceive other men with a mentality different from his own.” Deformed myth and magic can spread from cultural attitudes to social practices, opening religions, for instance, “to palpable idolatry and superstition, to orgiastic and cruel cults, even to the ritual murder of human sacrifice.”45 Usually in the more sophisticated, but still relatively undifferentiated, early societies, additional distorted interpretations of causality arise. The alchemist, for example, fails to distinguish between description and explanation, sustaining the belief that the properties of things are sensible qualities which can be detached and reassembled to transform elements. So, too, an anthropomorphic view of causality can inspire the astrologer: Causality cannot be merely an intelligible relation of dependence: it has to be explained and the explanation is reached by an appeal to the sensation of muscular effort and to the image of the transmission of effort through contact. So universal causality is a pervasive fate linking all things at once, keeping the wandering stars to their strange courses and, by the same stroke, settling for astrologers the destiny of men.46

Nevertheless, magic and the deformation of myth into explanations are not phenomena confined to the Age of Myth. As we have observed above, undifferentiated consciousness accompanies differentiated consciousness in its various stages throughout history. There is no guarantee either that the cultural superstructure will successfully beckon undifferentiated consciousness away from its aberrations, or that the cultural superstructure itself will be potent enough to withstand the fascination and temptation of


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magic. The gnostic illustrates the latter case. Gnosticism, which was born in the Hellenistic period after the development of philosophical speculation, mistakes heuristic anticipations, questions about the nature of an x, for actual insights into the x.47 Indeed, the very differentiation of explanation in theoretic culture can create its own form of magic and deformation of myth. Speaking of deformed myth, Lonergan warns that “the elimination of one myth tends to coincide with the genesis of another and the advance of science and philosophy implies merely that the later myths will be complemented and defended by appropriate philosophies and made effective through the discoveries of science and the inventions of technology.” Are not modern political ideologies and speculative philosophies of history, we may ask, neognostic deformations of myth with strains of magic, alchemy, and hermeticism? Do not modern totalitarian movements float on the tides of deformed myths and magic? Do not modern electronic media and mass education spawn their own versions of degenerate mythologies?48 “Never,” Lonergan remarks, “has adequately differentiated consciousness been more difficult to achieve. Never has the need to speak effectively to undifferentiated consciousness been greater.”49 Lonergan, then, indulges neither in a rationalist assault upon the Age of Myth nor in a romantic glorification of it. His philosophy precludes such simplistic evaluations: refusing to assess the meaning of historical events in terms of the meaning of some immanent historical process, it denies the legitimacy of rendering world-historical judgments about the absolute superiority of any one age over any other. The transcendent mystery of the drama of history must be preserved, and the balance of the principles of immanence and transcendence must be upheld. The subject matter of history is not just the person, nor civilizations, nor mankind at large: it is the process of inquiry. And each civilization, each age of the history of consciousness, participates in the drama of inquiry. Historiography must address each historical period, each civilization, to raise its questions, to learn from its encounter with being. Thus, historiography cannot reduce an age or a civilization to a mere historical stepping stone. Egyptian civilization is not a mere precursor to Israel or Hellas; Hellenic philosophy is not a mere herald to Scholasticism, which is not a mere prelude to modern science. Although the Age of Myth, as we have seen, is without an effective critique of meaning, it does not have as pronounced a tendency toward a fragmentation of meaning. Although, in its relative poverty and stagnation, it lacks the power for good that flows from modern science and technology, it likewise lacks the power for evil that comes from the same source. And although later ages can view its subjection to magic and superstition as

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illustrative of the imperative for a critique of meaning, they can also look to its myths, which represent the intention of truth and its object—the known unknown—as fitting subject matter for an anamnetic venture to recover proper openness to the mystery of the human condition.50

The Age of Theory Plato has pictured persons living in the Age of Myth as dwelling in a milieu conducive to the virtues of simplicity, honesty, and trust. What, however, is often overlooked by interpreters of Plato is that he sees the “golden age” of undifferentiated consciousness as marred by one glaring defect: the absence of philosophy.51 Would the denizens of the Golden Age have been any more receptive to Socrates’ project of inquiry than were the Athenians of his day? But what is the enduring value of the Socratic enterprise? For Lonergan, the answer is quite simple: the differentiation of philosophy allows for the possibility of criticizing or controlling the spontaneous meaning of the cultural infrastructure, and, hence, of correcting the propensity of the human mind, against which the Age of Myth has no effective defense, to trap itself in its own phantasmagoric creations. Or, to use a slightly different metaphor: Just as the earth, left to itself, can put forth creepers and shrubs, bushes and trees with such excessive abundance that there results an impenetrable jungle, so too the human mind, led by imagination and affect and uncontrolled by any reflexive technique, luxuriates in a world of myth with its glories to be achieved and its evils banished by the charms of magic.52

One might say that the intention of truth, as manifested in mythic consciousness, by its own immanent necessity eventually turns on itself as an object of reflection and criticizes itself. Alphabets, grammars, dictionaries, logics, theories of rhetoric, and metaphysics all contribute to the critical apparatus emergent with theoretical self-interpretation.53 The maturation of this systematic exigency is part of what has been characterized by Karl Jaspers, Lewis Mumford, and John Cobb as the “Axial Period” of history, by Bergson as the “open society,” and by Voegelin as a “leap in being.”54 The maturation, in Lonergan’s judgment, achieved its most developed form in Greek philosophy, which thereby became the paradigm of the Age of Theory. Lonergan consequently restricts his own ideal-types of the Age of Theory and of the subsequent Age of Interiority to Western history.55 Whether Lonergan’s ideal-type of the Age of Theory may be too restrictive


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and may do an injustice to the richness and complexity of his philosophy of history is a topic we shall have to broach shortly. First we must locate what Lonergan identifies as the birth of theoretical culture. Theoretical culture reached its fullest stature in the ”Greek discovery of the mind,” an intellectual trend riding on the increasing capacity of “linguistic explanations and statements to provide the sensible presentations for the insights that effect further development of thought and language.” This is to suggest that before the Greeks could set up a metaphysical account of the mind they had to bring about a literary, rhetorical, and argumentative development of language.56 They had to carry further the literary achievements of the Paleo-Oriental civilizations (e.g., the Epic of Gilgamesh). Thus a series of brilliant accomplishments in Greek literature laid the linguistic foundations for the philosophical objectification of the mind: the Homeric similes, which illuminated, objectified, and distinguished the varied springs of action in the epic heroes; the lyric poems, which worked out expressions of personal human feeling; and the great tragedies, which exhibited human decisions, their conflicts and interplay, and their consequences.57 Lonergan traces the actual Greek discovery of the mind through a number of milestones. Hesiod’s discerned false myths. Xenophanes and Hecataeus presented a bold critique of myths as such. Herodotus, the physicians, and the physicists displayed an empirical bent. Heraclitus explored the logos. Parmenides differentiated between sensation and understanding. The process of discovery reached its culmination and climax in the towering efforts of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. In contrast to the compact mode of expression found in the Age of Myth, a specialized technical language had now entered the cultural horizon: the language of theoretically differentiated consciousness.58 But the birth of philosophy was paralleled by the differentiation of religious consciousness in Zoroastrianism, the Hebrew prophets, the mystery cults, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, and Islam. The birth of philosophy itself was contingent upon the religious experiences of such mystic philosophers as Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle. Indeed, reflecting upon the most prominent characteristics of religious consciousness as Lonergan conceives of it, we have to conclude that philosophy is a variety of religious experience.59 Hence Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers adapted philosophy to the context of their religious experiences, perspectives, and heritages, fueling their concern to renounce aberration and to accept the purification wrought by the critical flames of theory. Although there was only a “slight tincture” of theory in the Greek councils of the church, theologians in the Western Middle Ages undertook

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a concerted, systematic appropriation of Greek theory. This monumental task of Scholasticism started with the speculation of Anselm to issue forth into the questio, books of the sentences, commentaries, and summae, aiming at a comprehensive, coherent system or Begrifflichkeit.60 Perhaps surprisingly, Lonergan accords little significance to religious differentiation in his ideal-type. And yet the pull of the sacred is at the core of the drama of history. It is a pull, a presence, that Lonergan finds constant amid the pluralism of religious interpretations, including those of the differentiated, higher religions mentioned in the paragraph above.61 (We can, of course, ponder whether the quality of differentiation may not have something to do with the quality of experience, albeit within a certain constant historical range.) Must not the idealÂ� type of the Age of Theory be cognizant of religious differentiation? Even were we to expand the ideal-type, however, to make it more reflective of religious differentiation, Lonergan’s paradigm of Western development might still hold as a norm if by the Age of Theory we mean a fusion of both theoretical differentiation and religious differentiation. The West (Greco-Roman civilization and European, or Western, civilization), we could argue, shows, along with other civilizations, religious differentiation, but it proves to be the fullest, or most sustained, instance of theoretical differentiation. This argument, though, cannot discount the imprint of such philosophical geniuses as Avicenna and Averroes on Islamic civilization. On the other hand, it is perhaps easier to judge Byzantine, Indian, and Chinese civilizations as less theoretically differentiated than that of the West. Byzantine intellectuals, while impressive as carriers of Greek scholarship and Biblical exegesis, were traditionalists who eschewed systematic formulations and tended to look askance at speculative thought. “Philosophy” in Indian civilization, in spite of its obviously penetrating insights in logic, psychology, metaphysics, and other fields, is possibly a misnomer because the spirit of Indian higher culture is the desire for moksha (liberation), rather than the Hellenic love of wisdom. Chinese civilization boasts its countless schools of philosophy; but, if we are to accept Voegelin’s careful assessment, its mode of differentiation was subdued and muted. Neither the Confucian nor the Taoist sage was able to break away completely from the older, more compact cosmological order as both sought, in their different ways, attunement with (relatively) undifferentiated cosmic order.62 Taking the Western case—from the Hellenic origins through the Middle Ages—as exemplary, then what were the salient features of its theoretical differentiation? Lonergan proposes that the differentiation of theoretical consciousness tended to forge a bifurcation of the world into the unfamiliar realm of theory and the everyday, commonsense realm of things as


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related to human perception, feelings, concerns, and interests. Plato talked about the world of eternal forms and the transient world of appearance, and Aristotle distinguished and correlated what is first absolutely, the priora quod se, and what is first for us, the priora quoad nos.63 We can try to pursue the direction of Lonergan’s analysis here to suggest that the “elements” of reality in the worldview of archaic humanity (the sacred, the world, society, and man) were differentiated. The Hebrews came to worship a world-transcendent deity; Solon, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle purged the divine, the “unseen measure,” of anthropomorphic trappings. The Ionians (Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes) studied the world as a reality with its own immanent laws. Solon was perhaps the first to conceive of society along analogous lines as, in the words of Cornelius Loew, “a more or less autonomous realm in which men are directly, genuinely responsible for order or disorder, and in which what happens can be analyzed as a chain of cause and effect.” The lyric poets, Parmenides, Heraclitus, the Pythagorians, the Sophists, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all participated in the discovery of true humanity as centering in the order of the human soul.64 After the elements of reality became differentiated, questions inevitably arose about the nature of each element and about its integrity. Is any given element a true reality, or is it mere appearance, an epiphenomenon? Reductionism insinuated its ugly tentacles, the most dangerous extremes being, on the one hand, a radical acosmic otherworldly religion (to reach its peak in the ancient gnostic movement) and, on the other hand, a crude materialism. The relationship among elements therefore became problematic. Is the sacred, nature, society, or the self the highest and most real element, if any? The question of the relation among the elements forced into the open the issue of suitable criteria for dealing with such problems, leading to the concern of Plato and of Aristotle with epistemology and metaphysics. The Platonic and Aristotelian reconstruction of the old mythic hierarchy of being placed the philosopher (in the classical Greek sense of the person with a well-ordered psyche) as the mediator between the overarching order of being and right order in human society. The Age of Theory achieved a revolutionary new understanding of basic horizon. The discovery of the human as a noetic and spiritual center implied human responsibility for the creation and maintenance of civilization; the differentiation of both theoretical and religious consciousness stressed individual responsibility and, within that context, emphasized a new, positive ideal of freedom.65 Furthermore, as we might expect, there was an appreciation of human historicity. Plato was certainly cognizant of the epochal nature of Greek philosophy, the existence of a decisive

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historical transformation with a “before” and an “after.” In a tour de force of existential analysis, he brilliantly delineated and described the sources of order and disorder in society—in effect, explicating the sources of what Lonergan calls progress and decline in history.66 It is this treatment of the dynamic forces of order and disorder in history, and not a theory of cycles nor a theory of regress, that constitutes the substance of Plato’s philosophy of history. Plato wrote about cycles of political forms on the analogy of cosmic cycles, but his framework of the account was a myth expressing the mystery of human existence. A number of factors, however, blunted the edge of a theoretical control of meaning so as to obscure the understanding of basic horizon and preclude satisfactory awareness of human historicity. First, according to Lonergan, the humanist tradition of Isocrates, repelled by the technical achievements of philosophy, stepped in and obliterated the difference between the world of common sense and the world of theory. This strand of humanism, spreading from Greece to Rome and from antiquity to the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance, marveled at the fact of language and traced all aspects of culture to man’s power of speech and persuasion. Being educated linguistically and becoming human it considered as interchangeable.67 Second—and this we must extrapolate from Lonergan—thinkers in the Age of Theory, who labored under a Greek conception of the physical universe that either attributed mind to the cosmos as a whole or at least held the beings of the celestial realm to be more intelligent than humans, tended, conversely, to ascribe to human history the qualities of a natural process. A distinction between nature and history was not sufficiently articulated. This is not to argue that the Greeks, for example, had no awareness of the temporality of human existence, for, in truth, they were painfully aware of the transience of things human. Nor is it to deny categorically that the ancients had a notion of progress; they surely had a greater historical bent and optimistic spirit than is customarily granted them.68 Nor is it to suggest that there were no insights into the historical nature of man’s being. But it is to challenge the depth of their understanding of human historicity and how pervasive in ancient culture were the ideas of human temporality and progress. Having already alluded to the richness of Plato’s conception of history, we can hardly maintain, though, that most intellectuals in the Age of Theory were as sensitive as was Plato to human historicity. The philosophy of history in antiquity, we can tentatively conclude, failed to appreciate adequately the radically temporal dimension of human existence, whereas medieval theologies of history tended to regard Providence too much as a natural force.


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Third—a point Lonergan stresses forcefully—the very advance of theoretical understanding also bred an excessive fascination with concepts, with logic, with the necessary, the immutable, the certain, with the end products of thought. Overlooked were the dynamism of the mind, the subjectivity and the historicity of human knowing, and, indeed, the subjectivity and the historicity of human living. This ominous philosophical development deserves further comment. Lonergan perceives two sides of Aristotle in tension with each other. On the one hand, there was his focus on insights as the ground of concepts.69 This tied in with his empiricism in ethics, which concentrated on the ethical reality of good men, who, guided by the virtue of prudence, navigate the chartless sea of contingency. On the other hand, he treated psychology in a metaphysical framework and formulated a scientific ideal, propounded chiefly in the Posterior Analytics, which was modeled after geometry. Aristotle conceived of the sciences “as prolongations of philosophy and as further determinations of the basic concepts philosophy provides.”70 Physical statements were determinations added to metaphysical statements, biological statements were determinations added to metaphysical and physical statements, and, finally, psychological statements were determinations added to metaphysical, physical, and biological statements. The upshot of this method was the failure to distinguish sharply between biology and psychology, and a consequent neglect of the properly historical realm. Thus Aristotle defined a soul as “the first act of an organic body,” whether of a plant, an animal, or a human. He differentiated souls by their potencies and potencies were known by their acts: acts were specified by their objects, and objects were defined not in terms of intentionality, but in terms of efficient or final causes.71 Clearly, by the soul, Aristotle did not mean the subject, the agent that makes history. Aristotle’s scientific ideal discovered its true paradigm in Greek geometry: it seeks true, certain knowledge of causal necessity. It demands not only conclusions that follow necessarily from premises but also premises that are necessary truths. It is opposed to the contingent, the merely factual, the existential. It sets up a split world. Genuine science (episteme) understands the necessary, the ultimate, the changeless. Mere opinion (doxa) must grapple with the ever elusive, the contingent, the fluctuating, the variable.72 Aristotle, Lonergan concludes, confused the bifurcation of theory and common sense with the bifurcation of the necessary and the contingent. Theories do not possess the immutability Aristotle ascribed to them, and Aristotle’s emphasis on logic prevented him from anticipating a method that could envisage an ongoing succession of systems, each with less than geometrical certitude. His object of theoretical contemplation,

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“an eternal heaven . . . and eternal cyclical recurrence,” does not square with the modern scientific worldview of emergent probability. The Aristotelian corpus, then, does not provide “either guidance for historical research or an understanding of the historicity of human reality.”73 If Aristotle’s scientific ideal were to be accepted as the supreme measure of truth—with a corresponding deemphasis on the process of understanding and of existential ethics—then the dialectic of philosophical positions and counterpositions would obtain. A growing gap would prevail between that scientific ideal and the actual performance of knowers; a pronounced contradiction would appear between the insistence on true and certain knowledge and the historicity of truth. Rather than fostering a critique of meaning, this brand of Aristotelianism would contribute to cultural decline. This is precisely what happened in the late Middle Ages after Aquinas’s massive synthesis of Aristotelian thought into the context of Christian theology. Aquinas himself, Lonergan maintains, was as little influenced by the ideal of necessity as was Aristotle in the totality of his worldview: “his familiarity with the whole of Aristotle protected him from any illusions that might be generated by the Posterior Analytics.”74 Accordingly, Aquinas’s “commentaries, quaestiones disputatae, summae, fall under the description of research followed by a search for understanding.” But in the wake of the ensuing acrimonious and dogmatic Augustinian– Aristotelian controversy, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham devoted almost exclusive attention to Aristotle’s logical works, thus taking the Posterior Analytics at face value. To be sure, the clarity and rigor of logical demonstration, although it conveyed little understanding, held great advantages in debate. In time, the vocabulary of Scotus dominated all schools of Scholasticism, including that of Thomism. The net result was the burst of skepticism and the philosophical decadence of late Scholasticism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.75 We must note that the debate of dogmatism versus skepticism was carried on within the ground rules supplied by the confrontation theory of truth—a debate and its ground rules that have been the legacy of late medieval philosophy to modern intellectual history. A fourth factor limiting the effectiveness of the Age of Theory in executing a critique of meaning, and one which reinforced its antihistorical immobilism, was the nature of posttheoretical, or postsystematic culture— the culture of what Lonergan names the “classicist mentality.” While the differentiated consciousness of the great philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, enriched a later philosophical humanism, this humanism lost “the cutting edge of genuine theory.”76 Indeed, the educated classes accepted the cri-


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tique by philosophy of earlier common sense, literature, and religions. They had among their sources of education the works of authentic philosophers; and they might on occasion employ this or that technical term or logical technique. Still, their predominant mode of thought was that of common sense and undifferentiated consciousness. The insights of philosophers became encased in dogmas in the process of la haute vulgarization.77 Philosophical humanism became intertwined with the humanism of Isocrates and the ideal of philanthropia, the respect and devotion to “man as man,” particularly as suffering man, to generate the “classicist mentality.”78 Classicist culture, according to Lonergan, “stemmed out of Greek paideia and Roman doctrine studium atque humanitatis, out of the exuberance of the Renaissance and its pruning in the Counter-Reformation schools of the Jesuits.” In practice, classicism, by its transformation of philosophical insights into dogmas, accepted the Aristotelian ideal of necessity and geometrical certitude. It interpreted culture in a normative sense and considered itself to be the culture, which, if rejected, made one into a barbarian. It fell into an antihistorical immobilism, believing that it could encapsulate culture in the universal, the normative, the ideal, and the immutable. It spoke in terms of “models to be imitated or ideal characters to be emulated, of eternal verities and universally valid laws.” It regarded classicist philosophy as the one perennial philosophy, classicist art as the set of immortal classics, and classicist laws and structures as the deposit of the wisdom and prudence of mankind.79 So was created a somewhat arbitrary, if refined, standardization of human nature.80 The stupendous achievement of the Age of Theory, the differentiation of the mind, was marred by classicist culture. This, we can judge, was the inherent weakness of the Age of Theory, that classicist culture concentrated on—glorified—the endproducts of conscious operations: concepts, moral laws, models of behavior. The Age of Theory, we can say, could not adequately integrate theory (or vulgarized theory) and common sense: it could tie together neither concept and image nor logic and the spontaneous, affective, and unconscious sides of human living. Classicist culture transmitted technical statements, protected good manners, and supported good morals in much the same way as the modern superstructure communicates to the infrastructure through “simile and metaphor, image and narrative, catch-phrase and slogan.” Do we not see here the source that only aggravated the perennial conflict between the cultural infrastructure and the cultural superstructure, with the incomprehension of the average person in the face of higher culture now heightened by the narrowness, the rigidity, and the repressive nature of the latter?81 Perhaps it is this very

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inflexibility that has contributed so mightily to the saga of continuing cultural strife Friedrich Heer has perceived in Western intellectual history: There has always been a struggle between “above” and “below” in Europe’s inner history. The “upper” culture of Christianity, educated humanism and rationalism has struggled against a “lower” culture of the masses. This cultural “underground” included both the deeper levels of the individual personality and the customs, manners and faith of the people. 82

Erich Neumann has spoken of the psychological damage done to the average person who could not live up to the standardized models and ideals and concepts of classicist culture.83 Can we conclude that, in the past two centuries, the West has witnessed, in the victory of the neoÂ�gnostic ideologies and revolutionary movements over traditional higher culture and the Old Regime, the rising up, in diabolical form, of a repressed dimension of human existence—a dimension that could not be properly integrated into the cultural horizon of the Age of Theory?

The Age of Interiority Lonergan’s third age in the history of consciousness must not be confused with a gnostic third and final realm of history. Although proclaimed by him as a Second Axial Period, it is nonetheless simply a working out of implications of the first breakthrough, promoting further differentiations of consciousness. The Age of Theory, we have submitted, found its most articulate form in the West. The succeeding age, too, has witnessed its impetus from Western sources. But with steady contacts between Western and non-Western civilizations, and with the faint outlines of an incipient global civilization flickering on the horizon, we might anticipate that the phenomena to be discussed below will henceforth assume a more global character and that the Western differentiations might be enriched by older, non-Western traditions as they are fertilized by Western influences. If the Age of Theory centered upon the “discovery of the mind,” the Age of Interiority revolves around the “discovery of the subject” (or the discovery of the “self”). The latter discovery entails three basic differentiations of consciousness that go beyond the horizons of ancient Greece and medieval Europe: the branching out of classical theory into both modern science and critical philosophy and the birth of a modern scholarship informed by historicity.84 Modern science has matured in explicit opposition to Aristotelian philosophy, but by the end of the eighteenth century it had successfully as-


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serted its autonomy from philosophy as such. Implicit in modern scientific method is an ideal that is radically opposed to the Aristotelian goal of true, certain knowledge of causal necessity. As Lonergan declares: But modern science is not true: it is only on the way towards truth. It is not certain; for its positive affirmations it claims no more than probability. It is not knowledge but hypothesis, theory, system, the best available scientific opinion of the day. Its object is not necessity but verified possibility. . . . Finally, while modern science speaks of causes, . . . its ultimate objective is to reach a complete explanation of all phenomena, and by such explanation is meant the determination of the terms and intelligible relationships that account for the data.85

Modern science is not essentialist; it is empirical. It has shifted emphasis from logic to method, from systems to heuristic structures that ground ongoing successions of logical systems. It demands the far-flung collaboration of a community of researchers. The modern scientific ideal was, of course, implicit in scientific practice, and yet it was clearly recognized only after the discovery and acceptance of non-Euclidean geometry brought mathematicians to acknowledge that their postulates or axioms were not necessary truths and after quantum mechanics and Keynesian economics led scientists to cease talking about necessary laws of nature and iron laws of economics.86 As modern science aims at an explanation of all data in terms of laws and routines, so modern scholarship sets as its goal “the historical reconstruction of the constructions of mankind.” “While elements of modern scholarship may be found here and there down the ages,” writes Lonergan, “its massive development was the work of the German Historical School of the nineteenth century.” In conflict with Hegel’s a priori theory of the meaning of history and in contrast to the empiricism of the natural sciences, the German School employed the category of Verstehen; the principles of hermeneutics worked out by F. Wolf and F. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) were extended by their pupil, August Boeck (1785–1867), to the whole range of the philological sciences and by Droysen to the entire field of historical investigation.87 Both the method and the results of modern historiography run counter to the purposes and assumptions of scholarship in the Age of Theory. Classicist scholarship aimed at the lofty heights of humanistic eloquence, but modern scholarship seeks a comprehensive understanding of all the human past. Classicist scholarship, not pondering the possibility of its own demise, assumed that it was the only culture, but modern scholarship discovers a vast array of cultures in human history. In contrast to the

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necessary and logically certain definitions of classicism, modern scholarship discerns a historical sequence of different definitions. In contrast to the immutable doctrines of classicism, modern scholarship studies the histories of doctrines, “the moment of their births, the course of their development, their interweaving, their moments of high synthesis, their periods of stagnation, decline, dissolution.” In brief, the differentiation of scholarly consciousness has assaulted the stubborn old normative idea of a culture and replaced it with a fluid awareness of cultural pluralism.88 The scientific and scholarly differentiations of consciousness together effected a momentous transformation from a cosmocentric to an anthropocentric view of the world, which placed in question the previous understanding of philosophy, of morals, and of religion.89 This, in turn, spawned a new direction in philosophy itself—an explicit methodical differentiation of critical consciousness. The enormousness of this epochal movement, from Lonergan’s standpoint—for it is the essential animating principle of his work to thematize the existential, intentional, and structural foundations of philosophy in light of the new critical exigency—impels us to explore briefly the salient currents of the movement. We must have recourse here to Lonergan’s direct statements, to clues from his approach, and to supplementary ideas. The Scientific Revolution, we can postulate, destroyed the Greek idea of the cosmos and, with it, its hylozoism and its hierarchical order. Human beings, for example, no longer found themselves lower than the celestial beings in intelligence. Nor did they observe any more a hierarchy of qualitative distinctions in the cosmos as an analogue for a hierarchy in the social world. As Collingwood has argued, the true significance of Copernicus’s astronomical discovery “consists not so much in displacing the world’s center from the earth to the sun as in implicitly denying that the world has a center at all.” We would suggest that when the universe was conceived in modern scientific, rather than in common-sense, terms, the old symbolic relation to the cosmos was severely challenged. A host of decisive questions would ultimately force themselves on the shaken intellectual horizon. Was not an adjustment of symbolic consciousness required? Do we still live in the cosmos of myth and symbol—as well as in the universe of physics? What is the cognitive status of myth and of science? Are they both valid forms of understanding? Can either myth or science properly reflect on these issues? The Scientific Revolution seared the skin of the Age of Theory. Science replaced theory. Could science replace philosophy? Old truths and distinctions had to be rediscovered and reappropriated in the new context. Neglected issues came to the fore. In antiquity and the Middle Ages, the educated classes could respond to the cosmos in a manner


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that allowed a certain play for mythic consciousness. Side by side with the great edifice of Scholasticism was the medieval “symbolist attitude” as portrayed by Huizinga: “The world unfolds itself like a vast whole of symbols, like a cathedral of ideas. It is the most richly rhythmical conception of the world, a polyphonous expression of eternal harmony.” But this integration of theory and symbol was too uncritical. Plato’s insights into the linkage between the distinct spheres of noetic consciousness and mythic consciousness had all but been lost, only slowly to be recovered through a process that eventually tapped the energies of Schelling, the Symbolists, and twentieth-century anthropologists, historians, and phenomenologists. Nor was Plato’s differentiation of the world of theory from the world of common sense properly understood by most educated persons in the Age of Theory, who would tend to conceive of Plato’s idea of theory from the horizon of a reified and otherworldly neoÂ�-Platonism. The Scientific Revolution forced people to take notice of the sharp division between the world of theory and the world of common sense, whether between Galileo’s primary and secondary qualities, or between Eddington’s two tables, one mostly empty space with a chaos of vibrating unimaginable “wavicles,” the other bulky, solid, and colored.90 The relation between the world of theory and the world of common sense became a philosophical problem of the first magnitude. And lurking in the background was the issue of the nature and function of myth. The Enlightenment tried to replace classicist culture with a scientific culture by grounding the validity of social and moral order in the laws of nature. The Enlightenment—or as Lonergan came to call it, following Frederick Lawrence, the “First Enlightenment”—ultimately failed in its ambitious task because it was mistaken in the hope that it could derive values from the facts that modern empirical science (as it was conventionally interpreted) ascertained, thereby committing the “naturalistic fallacy.”91 Although scientism, naturalism, positivism, and behaviorism still remain powerful intellectual forces in the contemporary world, from Lonergan’s perspective, they have no substantive authority. No scientific theory can be a substitute for philosophy. By creating a cleft between theory and common sense, the modern view of the universe, we would urge, opened the path for a clearer distinction to be drawn between nature and history than had been possible in the Age of Theory. The intense focus on the differentiated realm of nature also, by contrast, drew more lucidly the lines of the historical world. Furthermore, the Scientific Revolution, the nascent Industrial Revolution, and the French Revolution all supported the strong conviction of participating in an epoch of history. Modern human beings became aware that persons

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collectively are responsible for the world in which they lead their lives.92 It was therefore to history that intellectuals turned as they searched for the meaning that had eluded the grasp of the Enlightenment, which clung to the laws of nature. Certain strands of thought in the Enlightenment itself were fundamental to the nineteenth-century effort to establish philosophical, moral, and spiritual truth by an appeal to history, for it is in history that one can study the genesis of ideas and values. Nevertheless, as the crisis of historicism demonstrated, simply recording the historical origins of ideas and values cannot, in itself, validate or invalidate those ideas and values, and, in entertaining such a hope, historicism committed the “genetic fallacy.” It left in its train the specter of relativism and nihilism. An earlier void, created by a blistering assault on both Christianity and classicist culture, inspired also an interest in historical consciousness as a substitute for the lost verities. Into this vacuum stepped the dazzling neognostic systems of speculation (German Idealism) and the more mundane neoÂ�gnostic revolutionary movements, which saw meaning in the process of history. As we have already contended in this chapter, however, these philosophies of history and these ideologies have been basically intellectual constructions attached to deformed myths that desperately try to explain away the known unknown of the human condition. Neither the Enlightenment, which opted for its version of theory, nor historicism, which opted for a kind of common sense, could establish a modern critique of meaning. Neither, that is, could provide an integration of the world of theory and the world of common sense. On top of this, the development of modern technology and rational bureaucracy has ushered in a new variation of the old antagonism of theory and common sense: the opposition of technocrats, advocating social engineering, and romanticists, desiring to escape from the prison of modern society. The modern bureaucratic apparatus has initiated a frontal assault on common sense itself: it forsakes equity, stifles the creativity of the person on the spot, and provides ample room for the exercise of the poisonous will to power.93 The person on the spot may rebel against such constraints, but who can truly become familiar enough with the relevant fields of everyday living in modern society? An integration of these two components of social engineering and romanticism was accomplished in the twentieth century by totalitarian practicality, which combined technological domination with the irrationalism of deformed myth and magic (and, in the case of totalitarianism of the right, the irrationalism was spiced with nihilism), achieving, according to its own nightmare vision, a unity of “theory” and “practice.” Surely in the face of positivism, naturalism, behaviorism, social engineering, thought-control by the mass media, romanticist escapism, histori-


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cal relativism, totalitarian myth, and revolutionary magic there can be no illusion that Lonergan’s third stage in the history of consciousness is the culmination of world history.94 Yet Lonergan does not despair over the possibility of a philosophical culture that could forge a more humane use of science and a wiser control over technology.95 What is called for is a Second Enlightenment with both a cultural and a social task—a task that must address precisely the issues posed by modern science and by modern historical scholarship. There can be no easy return to the halcyon days of the philosophies of yesteryear. Neither science, which has taken the place of classical theory, nor scholarship, nor neognostic revolutionary practice can assume the function of true philosophy. But what then is philosophy in the modern world—an authentic, modern philosophy capable of meeting the historical challenges in this period after the Age of Theory? Lonergan’s answer is that a third differentiation of consciousness has indeed emerged to complement and to guide the scientific and the scholarly differentiations—namely, a shift to subjectivity and interiority in modern consciousness, with its growing focus on the cognitional, moral, and spiritual performance of the concrete, historically situated person. Lonergan’s own philosophy obviously is a comprehensive endeavor to realize the program of this critical philosophy. The previous three chapters have been, in effect, an extensive illustration of this third differentiation of consciousness at work. What remains to be done at this juncture is to recount Lonergan’s summary of the historical genesis of the critical philosophical horizon and his observations on its prospects. Five points can be emphasized here. First, critical philosophy had its stage of literary preparation. Just as advances in Greek literature, as we have seen, were a necessary step in the “discovery of the mind,” so the capacities of ordinary language had to be expanded to deal with subjectivity. Lonergan suggests that among the writings that paved the way toward a critical philosophical appropriation of interiority were Augustine’s “penetrating reflections on knowledge and consciousness,” Descartes’ Regulae ad directionem ingenii, Pascal’s Pensees, and Newman’s Grammar of Assent.96 Second, the dialectic of philosophical horizons over a span of centuries revealed the woeful inadequacy of the myriad historical formulations of the confrontation theory of truth; at the same time, the gradual revision of these counterpositions reinforced the exigency to lay the foundations of epistemology in personal knowledge. Lonergan’s sketch of this trend commences with Descartes, who “explicitly envisaged and vigorously explored” the problem of philosophical method. It was this bold project of Descartes that was to inaugurate the development in modern

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thought, climaxing in “the discovery of the subject.” The dubious status of the confrontation theory of truth, which had ruled philosophy since the later Middle Ages, sparked the epistemological concern of Descartes, and later of Hume and Kant. Meanwhile, the problematic nature of the relation between the world of theory and the world of common sense showed itself in the juxtaposition of Galileo’s primary and secondary qualities, in Descartes’ mind in a machine, in Spinoza’s two known attributes, and in Kant’s a priori forms and a posteriori filling of the sensibility; this modern preoccupation with dualism also exhibited itself in the writings of Hobbes, Malebranche, the Cambridge Platonists, and Berkeley. The struggles of modern philosophers over epistemological questions invariably clarified the problems, but they also indicated that no satisfactory resolution of them could come by concentrating on the objective pole of horizons. “Kant’s Copernican Revolution marks a dividing line.” Thereafter, Fichte and Hegel entered the uncharted regions of the dynamism of the mind. Indeed, Hegel, in his exploration of realms of meaning and in his challenge of every formulated scientific ideal, made his dramatic turn “from substance to subject.” Later, Husserl refined intentionality analysis as a means of understanding subjectivity. This became a crucial philosophical reorientation for the twentieth-century attempt to comprehend interiority because it erected a method explicitly to study the data of consciousness.97 Third, phenomenological description and transcendental analysis of the consciousness of the subject have been spurred by the rich background provided by sophisticated developments in mathematics, science, historical scholarship, and depth psychology. The cognitional practice in these specialized and sophisticated disciplines supplies data to complement the abundant evidence of commonsense intelligence. Furthermore, the self-appropriation of one’s interiority—what Lonergan means by selfknowledge—does not yield an horizon fragmented by totally incompatible methods of science, scholarship, and common sense; rather, it uncovers the intelligent subjectivity that constitutes, and hence unifies, the realms of science, scholarship, and common sense. It similarly shows that authentic subjectivity is the anchor and ground of objectivity in all fields of knowing (Lonergan names this critique of knowing the “critical exigency”). The objectification of the basic method of human consciousness establishes, on a critical foundation, the relations among the methods of science, scholarship, and common sense (Lonergan calls the differentiation of the sciences and the construction of their methods the “methodical exigency”).98 Fourth, within the past two centuries, leading thinkers have broadened the philosophical horizon by locating the epistemological considerations


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adumbrated above within the larger, sublating framework of existential concerns. Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Blondel, the pragmatists, and the existentialists have stressed will and decision, action and results, moral commitment and religious consciousness.99 The dynamic conscious orientation of the person, then, opens not only to common sense, science, and scholarship, but also to art, myth, and religion. The Age of Interiority, it would seem, has a firmer basis than did the Age of Theory to inspire an harmonious integration of the diverse realms and dimensions of human living.100 It can resolutely refuse to posit an essential conflict between subjectivity and objectivity. It can rediscover the philosophical significance of myth as it comes to recognize that the unrestricted intentionality which underpins cognition and moral life is directed to the mystery of the known unknown born of a desire for the absolute. It can distinguish between authenticity and inauthenticity in human living and discern their fruits in the patterns of progress and decline throughout history. In short, it can replace the classicist notion of one culture valid for all time with the idea of a dialectic of basic horizon and relative horizons. Fifth, Lonergan does not pretend to be a prophet. The fusion of epistemological critique with intense awareness of historicity, which he espouses and has sought to accomplish, can, he believes, nurture a Second Enlightenment equipped to guide modern civilization to meet the challenge of historical responsibility. But what are its prospects? Undoubtedly, some intellectuals will cling to the outmoded ideals of the classicist mentality. Others will reject classicism and dogmatism but do so in an uncritical and hasty manner, desperately grasping for new straws. But still others will be patient, sturdy pathfinders in the relatively unexplored forest of interiority: There is bound to be formed a solid right that is determined to live in a world that no longer exists. There is bound to be formed a scattered left, captivated by now this, now that new development, exploring now this and now that new possibility. But what will count is a perhaps not numerous center, big enough to be at home in both the old and the new. painstaking enough to work out one by one the transitions to be made, strong enough to refuse half-measures and insist on complete solutions even though it has to wait.101

Lonergan would number himself among the members of the “not numerous center.” They would not be inherently associated with any identifiable class, any particular academy, or any recognizable institution. They would participate in a new dimension of consciousness—these modern theoroi on their voyages of inquiry, with all the attendant exhilarations,

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discoveries, dangers, and sufferings.102 They would constitute the nucleus of a creative minority whose destiny in the drama of history remains yet an unknown.103

Methodological and Substantive Considerations Lonergan’s achievement with respect to a speculative philosophy of history, we can judge, is considerable, both methodologically and substantively. Methodologically, Lonergan’s presentation argues forcefully for acceptance of the history of consciousness as a distinct field of historical inquiry, more comprehensive in scope than psychology, cultural history, history of ideas, intellectual history, and history of philosophy. His powerful idealtypes furnish a needed stimulus and guide for research in the history of consciousness and allied fields in the history of thought. The foundation for the whole enterprise is Lonergan’s sophisticated appropriation of the structure of conscious and intentional operations. While the foundation is theoretical, the base is decidedly empirical: Lonergan’s theory of consciousness is rooted in experience itself, and hence it is verifiable. Indeed, Lonergan invites further investigations of the theoretical issues with which he has wrestled. Criticism and correction can come through philosophical self-scrutiny. Moreover, Lonergan urges that his ideal-types be tightened and revised through the rigors of historical studies and the advances of the human sciences. Thus, Lonergan’s theoretical constructs for the history of consciousness can promise a unique degree of utility not had by more deductivist or intuitionist approaches. Substantively, although Lonergan refuses to succumb to the lure of universal history—either of the old theological variety, culminating in that of Bossuet, or of the modernist variety of nineteenth-century idealists, materialists, or progressivists—he nevertheless paints the history of consciousness with a sweeping brush. We need only summarize here how his division of the history of consciousness into the Age of Myth, the Age of Theory, and the Age of Interiority renders intelligible radical horizon shifts in the history of human self-interpretation. Lonergan’s analysis explains the phenomenon of myth and its deformation in the period of undifferentiated consciousness while clarifying the status of myth in subsequent eras. It traces the differentiation of the intellectual pattern of experience to illuminate the historical significance and critical task of philosophy, the birth of the distinct intellectual class, and the inevitable tension between the spontaneity of the cultural infrastructure and the reflective distance of


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higher culture. It is nuanced enough to discern the radical cleft between a genuine systematic exigency and various forms of conceptualism, reification, and objectivism. It distinguishes between classicist culture and modern culture, shows the philosophical import of modern science and of modern scholarship, and indicates the historical meaning of the “rise of subjectivity.” Lonergan, then, pleads for continued investigation. Of the further questions, both methodological and substantive, that we might pose, the following five would seem most pressing. First, Lonergan’s modified speculative philosophy of history is incomplete. The task remains to generate a speculative philosophy of history on the grand scale by combining the history of consciousness with a viable theory of progress and decline. Lonergan is fascinated by Toynbee’s sweeping study of patterns of civilizations and, we would urge, rightly applauds his overall ambitious enterprise. But Toynbee’s ideal types, including those of the creative minority and of challenge and response, must be filled in, adjusted, and made more explanatory. Lonergan similarly admires Sorokin’s schema of the sequence of “ideational” (creative spiritual inspiration), “idealistic” (mature reasoned synthesis), and “sensate” (hedonistic) cultures in the life of a society. Franz Borkenau, whose published essays display a family resemblance to the monumental historical works of Toynbee and Sorokin, devotes considerably more time and skill to discovering historical connections among civilizations than do the latter.104 Borkenau, who frequently mentions Toynbee, though most often with a critical intent, portrays the creative fusion of barbarian traditions with those of adjacent receding civilizations in the forge of dreadful Dark Ages. The net result, argues Borkenau, is usually the creation of a new, socially effective myth of a new civilization, which ultimately revolves around a stance toward death. When the social efficacy of the myth eventually wanes, the civilization fragments. Similarly, Quigley sees the “ideology” of a society disintegrating when the social instruments of active expansion become subsumed by social institutions devoted to their own survival.105 This, according to Quigley, is the dynamism behind the phases of civilization, and it clearly echoes Lonergan’s contention that decline is caused when functionaries and bureaucracies replace the insights of the persons on the spot. How might we correlate Toynbee’s ideal-types of the creative minority and of challenge and response, Sorokin’s sequences of ideational, idealistic, and sensate cultures, Borkenau’s observations on barbarians, Dark Ages, and myths, and Quigley’s phases of civilization and its “mechanism” of rise and fall with Lonergan’s theory of progress and decline and his idea of differentiations of consciousness?

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Informed by this problematic, a grand-scale speculative philosophy of history, such as we envision it here, might address the following kinds of open questions. Who are the creative minorities? When do they arrive at the historical scene? Why? Where? Is Sorokin’s “ideational” phase an era when a creative minority, at the crossroads of different cultures, spins the great myths of an incipient civilization? Does this period typically, as Borkenau maintains, commence in a Dark Age, involving confused, but vigorous, barbarians in contact with the residues and wreckage of a fading civilization? Do we see here a creative response to a crisis situation (dramatically showing human finitude) permeated by dread? Does dread reveal its positive, spiritual side as cultural energy bursts forth to expand horizons and spur progress? In Sorokin’s “idealistic” phase, do we witness a careful and sober integration of the growing traditions? If fifth-century Athens and thirteenth-century Europe are most exemplary of an “idealistic” synthesis of faith and reason, as Sorokin alleges, do we nonetheless find more compact versions in societies during the Age of Myth? Is the “idealistic” phase, as Sorokin describes it, more applicable to societies in the Age of Theory? Is the earlier “ideational” phase to be associated with Lonergan’s existential level of consciousness (issuing foundational value judgments), while the “ideational” phase is to be tied as well to the culturally differentiated levels of judgment and understanding (engaged in the refining of doctrines and in systematic reflection)? If the “idealistic” outlook is hamstrung by the classicist mentality, does this curtail the flexibility of the engendering myths of the civilization? Is it always the inevitable censorship attached to public myths that invites decline? Why is Sorokin’s “sensate” phase a period of decline? Is there a loss of faith? Is the period of decline always one of hedonism, or can institutions simply become frozen, as Quigley alleges, and attitudes become polluted by magic, as in ancient Egypt of the first (and perhaps second) millennium? Does the very success of a civilization foster hubris and cultivate the sickness unto death? Do challenges become overwhelming? Is integration impossible? Is dread negative? Is the hedonism of “sensate” culture tied to divertissements and to ressentiment? If the malady of decline is a perpetual threat, is the cycle of progress and decline still inevitable (witness Quigley’s “exceptionalism” of the West thus far)? Does the Age of Interiority offer any corrective to the cycle of progress and decline? Can critical appropriation of historical tradition contribute to reconstructing a society in decline? Can an aesthetically sensitive critical culture renew the core myths and tell a new story? This list of questions, preliminary as it is, is merely suggestive of the inquiry that must carry forward the legitimate project of a substantive speculative philosophy of history of the sort Lonergan seems to advocate.


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Second—to initiate a series of questions about the subject matter of the history of consciousness—it is crucial for the history of consciousness to ascertain the exact cognitive and existential status of myth. Surely the positive and enduring contribution of myth to human understanding and human living needs elucidation beyond the tantalizing remarks of Lonergan about mystery, symbols, and the élan vital. Such a comprehensive treatment of mythopoesis would include the following topics: its origins in the dynamics of the sensitive psyche (as Robert Doran has emphasized), the heuristic nature of authentic mythic understanding, the narrative quality of human existence, the imprint of scientific cosmology on myth, the complex relation between myth and differentiated consciousness, and the historicity of myth itself. In addition, there looms the problematic of the deformation of myth. Lonergan has penetrating observations about the myriad distortions of thinking to which untutored myth is prone. But the existential roots of mythic deformation need also to be uncovered. We are reminded of Auden’s warning about the “enchantment of the false sacred.” We can heed the relevance of Kierkegaard’s analysis of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious spheres of existence.106 We can enter here the magical terrain where anxious flight from reality, bearing an infinite craving, parades under the banner of the sacred and hails the apotheosis of a group or movement or civilization. We enter here the land of dread and concupiscence. Third, Lonergan’s ideal-type of the Age of Theory, as we have suggested, may be strained. To be sure, an ideal-type, by definition, is not an exact description of historical reality but only an approximation through the model of an intelligible pattern. The fundamental issue is always its utility. We can, in fact, mount arguments pro and con about the utility of the ideal-type of the Age of Theory, and it will prove fruitful to present them briefly, even if ultimately we shall render a favorable verdict. There is no doubt, on the one hand, that around 500 BC what Lonergan calls a cultural superstructure was born, or that Socrates sought universal definitions, or that Greek thinkers began systematic investigation of topics. This ideal-type is not impugned by the fact that the carriers of differentiated consciousness were an elite or that it reached its most concentrated form in Hellas and the Western tradition and not elsewhere on the globe. The breakthrough of a creative minority or of advanced communities has often delineated time periods, as we see, for example, in the cases of the Enlightenment, the Romantic Era, the Agricultural Age, or the Iron Age. We should note that in the Age of Theory there seems to be a quaternary pattern, which is repeated twice. A creative surge is followed by stale dogmatism, and the dogmatism then evokes a skeptical reaction that, outside

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of more radical philosophical spokesmen, engenders a humanistic tradition devoid of a solid philosophical orientation. So the insights of Plato and Aristotle were watered down by the Academy and the Peripatetics. The Platonic and Aristotelian schools and the Hellenistic philosophies of conduct increasingly avoided genuinely systematic and open discussions of basic philosophical issues. One response to this dogmatic atmosphere was skepticism, and the sting of skepticism only enhanced the appeal of rhetoric, which looked askance at theory. The school of Isocrates won out over the school of Plato in the battle of these two forms of humanism that, according to Werner Jaeger, ran “like a leitmotiv throughout the history of ancient civilization.”).107 Lonergan considers the theology of the early church and of the Patres as an educated kind of common sense, often employing theoretical terms only in a metaphorical sense. In Lonergan’s judgment, even the brilliance of Augustine was expressed primarily in a common-sense mode.108 It was the Scholastic movement that reintroduced an authentic theoretical impulse. But the acrimonious debates among medieval Schoolmen, starting in the generation after Aquinas, ushered in a new era of dogmatism, only to invite another wave of skepticism in the nominalist movement. And in the early modern period, a classicist culture with its rigid standards and humanistic canons of literature attempted to salvage a frozen residue of the creativity of earlier periods. We can conclude that the ideal-type of the Age of Theory does not lose its efficacy because of these—perhaps inevitable—fluctuations. On the other hand, we must ask whether prior to the modern period the differentiation of theoretical culture was the sole development worthy of note in the history of consciousness. Had not human self-interpretation reached a major watershed, a decisive transformation, with the spiritual differentiation of the higher religions? And to what degree was the turn to interiority present in the Age of Theory? The Socratic enterprise certainly included decidedly religious and existential overtones, for the effort to control meaning was also the way of life of the lover of wisdom. Lonergan himself admits that Plato’s dialogues were “suggestive of the subject.” Lonergan views Augustine’s exploration of human interiority as a brilliant and penetrating common-sense precursor to the Age of Interiority. AristotÂ� le and Aquinas, he remarks, “used introspection and did it brilliantly.”109 Aristotle, as we have seen, was aware of the norms ingredient in the process of inquiry, particularly in his ethical writings. Aquinas viewed his works in terms of research and the search for understanding. Nevertheless, Aquinas, in Lonergan’s estimation, was a man of his time who “had to leave to a later age the task of acknowledging the discontinuity of natural and human science and of working out its methodological implications.”


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Lonergan contends that none of these towering figures objectified cognitional process as structure nor transposed introspection into a reflectively elaborated technique.110 The same judgment would seem to apply to neoPlatonism, which, whatever its profundities, was other-worldly in orientation and consequently could not take time and history seriously. Would this judgment also obtain with respect to Chinese philosophy and Indian philosophy? While Eastern thought did not attain the same measure of theoretical differentiation as did Greek philosophy in the West, it did focus on dimensions of subjectivity in its mysticism, its psychology, and its ethics. Missing, however, from traditional Eastern thought was the context of critical philosophy, empirical science, and a notion of historicity. Yet is the objectification of cognitional process as structure the single determinant of the Age of Interiority? Has any reflective technique ever surpassed the dramatic artistry of the Platonic dialogues in objectifying cognition precisely as process and highlighting the guiding role of existential consciousness? This would seem to be a supreme example of what KierÂ� kegaard called “indirect communication,” that mode of expression most appropriate to explicate existential subjectivity.111 If Lonergan’s methodology is the most comprehensive objectification of conscious and intentional operations, and if his sophisticated methodology is the most effectual manner to objectify cognitional structure, is it not true that something like Kierkegaard’s indirect communication is the most efficacious way to engage subjectivity? Must not methodology, then, be tied to existential explication? And can the latter project reside exclusively in Lonergan’s functional specialty of communications (correlative, as it is. to the level of experiencing)? Or is it, precisely as concerned with existential issues, equally a dialectical and foundational project? Indeed, it would seem that the Kierkegaardian type of existential explication is a font of inspiration and fertile ground of insight for methodological reflection, just as methodological reflection is a necessary source of clarification of the structure of existential consciousness for existential explication. Or, to put it another way, are not the Platonic dialogues and Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works the equivalent, on the existential level, of Lonergan’s cognitional exercises in Insight? If Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works belong to the Age of Interiority, as Lonergan intimates, then do not the Platonic dialogues belong there as well? This is not to say that Plato’s exploration of subjectivity was exhaustive, for he seemed to equate authentic subjectivity with the religious calling of the philosopher. But this is to say that the exploration of subjectivity was a salient theme in his writings. Fourth, the foregoing considerations lead us to ponder to what extent the Age of Theory and the Age of Interiority are integral parts of one

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great movement of differentiation. The time-span of two thousand years between the Greek Enlightenment and the modern Enlightenment may seem forbidding. But from the perspective of a history of consciousness it is a relatively brief episode in the drama of history. Indeed, we could look at the past ten thousand years as one major trend: the Agricultural Revolution and the Urban Revolution, separated from each other by about five thousand years, established the technological a priori for the cultural superstructure; the destruction of Bronze Age civilizations about 1200 BC, with the attendant “times of troubles,” challenged, for some, the validity of the myth that tied order in human society to cosmic-divine order, thereby provoking an intellectual crisis to which the Greek theoroi responded; the Greek achievement ran through the pre-Socratic discovery of the mind, to the cultural crisis of the Greek Enlightenment during the age of the Sophists. and to the Socratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian climax with its somewhat ambiguous concern for theory and interiority; the theoretical life then underwent the fluctuations alluded to above until the Scientific Revolution and the modern Enlightenment brought it to the threshold of the unambiguous discovery of the subject. This scenario does not necessarily assault the utility of Lonergan’s ideal-types, but it does warn us not to apply Lonergan’s constructs dogmatically. They are heuristic tools, devices to foster continuous inquiry into the complicated fabric of historical life. And their utility, in part, is gauged by how well they permit us to pinpoint more accurately the most significant exceptions, departures. and disparities. Fifth, does the history of consciousness end with Lonergan? Is Lonergan’s scheme of the Age of Interiority just another of what Voegelin has called the “stop history” programs of the modern age and its deculturation?112 Lonergan, of course, did not think so. He saw his effort as a beginning, an invitation to collaboration, revision, criticism. For those who might insist that his methodology is the most comprehensive framework for understanding subjectivity and might go so far as to agree with Lonergan that his cognitional theory is not radically revisable, they must be careful not to become so entranced with his genius as a polymath and with the awesome edifice of his philosophy as to fail to place his endeavor in its proper historical perspective. We must not do for Lonergan what Theophrastus did for Aristotle (apparently with the latter’s blessing)—namely, make his work into the logical culmination of the entire history of philosophy. The Age of Interiority is not simply encapsulated in Lonergan. There have been other laborers in the vineyard—Polanyi, Voegelin, and Gadamer come readily to mind—and there will be more.113 What Lonergan’s speculative philosophy of history, provides, however, is distinctive. His sophisticated reflection on


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the foundations of the discipline of the history of consciousness offers a nondogmatic unifying heuristic that can foster fruitful interdisciplinary cooperation over a monumental range of data.114 The caveat above is linked to a more general concern to which we must return by way of conclusion. The history of consciousness, as we have been portraying it, is the story of significant differentiations of consciousness amid the human search for meaning. Such contemporary commentators on the speculative philosophy of history as Bruce Mazlish, Frank Manuel, and Hayden White have recoiled against a priori systems and gnostic tendencies.115 Their caution has dictated, for them, a skeptical stance. Following Lonergan, however, we need not succumb to skepticism as an alternative to gnosis for along with meaning—and indeed intrinsically bound up with it—there is mystery. The field of meaning is surrounded by the field of mystery. History is a project revolving around a dialectic of performance and interpretation within the transcendental horizon of the process of inquiry, whose goal can be directly represented only through the obscurity of symbols welling up luminous with heuristic insight from the depths of the psyche and its generic wonder. The inquiry at the core of the drama of history—through all the differentiations of consciousness— opens to the known unknown, and this orientation is expressed through, and guided by, symbols, myths, and narratives, that is, by elemental, or compact, meanings, which nonetheless have a cognitive dimension. And yet the point around which the drama of history revolves is ultimately the still point. Axial developments in history do not form an axis of history definitively revealing the essence of history. There are lines of meaning in history that do not run along lines of time.116

Conclusion

I n th e “preliminary sketch” in chapter 1, we introduced a number of inquirers, among whom was an historian interested in understanding an ancient civilization. In subsequent chapters we have explored, in effect, what would be the historian’s process of inquiry thought the relevant disciplines within which he or she would operate and what would be the historian’s functional relationship to other disciplines. The historian, for example, would probably find useful and perhaps indispensable the research of archeologists and philologists and the interpretations of texts by exegetes. While communicating his or her works to other historians and being critically reviewed by colleagues, the historian’s scholarship would also become data for the reflection of philosophers and social theorists. The historian would proceed by being attentive to the relevant sources, by seeking insights into the material, by formulating historical interpretations, whether descriptive, or explanatory, or narrative (or some combination), by testing the validity of the interpretations in light of relevant criteria, and by judging the adequacy of the interpretation. The historian might also seek insights to render evaluations. To the extent that the historian seeks historical truth, he or she would operate within the universal viewpoint correlative to the sweep of the desire to know and objectivity would be the result of fidelity to the quest for historical truth through the structured operations of historical inquiry. Insofar as the historian deals with the thought of the civilization in question, the historian will have to engage, or use the fruits of efforts by colleagues, in such disciplines as psychohistory, cultural history, history of ideas, intellectual history, and history of philosophy. Insofar as the subject matter under investigation is an early civilization, the historian will have to employ the foregoing disciplines within the context of some ideal-type of the “age of myth,” which would come under the purview of the history of consciousness. The concrete image, then, of such an historian performing the task of historical inquiry can help us review the substance of Lonergan’s epistemological and speculative philosophies of history. Most important, the image can remind us of Lonergan’s claim that 152

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his philosophy of history is based on what historians actually do (whether or not they are particularly articulate about their performance). This is what Lonergan means when he says that his philosophy can be verified by the data of consciousness. Lonergan’s approach to historiography comes at the conjunction of three major intellectual developments: the domination of late mediaeval and modern thought by the confrontation theory of truth, to which postmodernism is but an incomplete and premature reaction; the rise of historical consciousness, which places a premium on human existence as historical; and the development of sophisticated specializations of historical disciplines. Historical consciousness, insofar as it would make humans collectively responsible for the direction of history, has as a potential ally in the historical disciplines, which could provide critical appropriation of the past as mediation in the present for future action. The confrontation theory of truth, however, is the overarching framework for interpreting the nature of historical method, historical objectivity, and indeed, historical existence. And it is from within this framework that existentialists have drawn a sharp bifurcation between the objectifying tendencies of historical science and the subjectivity of historically situated existence. Positivists have decried the possibilities of evaluation and critique of the past. Analytic philosophers have struggled with the temptation of linguistic historicism. And postmodernists have deconstructed objective historical discourse and—in the limit—history itself. Far from being caricature of the age, this is a realistic portrait of one of its greatest challenges. For as Lonergan has argued: . . . the vast modern effort to understand meaning in all its manifestations has not been matched by a comparable effort in judging meaning. The effort to understand is the common task of unnumbered scientists and scholars. But judging and deciding are left to the individual, and he finds his plight desperate.1

The plight is not just desperate for individuals but also for humanity at large, for, as Lonergan has further argued, “the very advance of knowledge brings a power over nature and over men too vast and terrifying to be entrusted to the good intentions of unconsciously biased minds.”2 The confrontation theory of truth has held sway, in Lonergan’s estimation, over much of the history of philosophy, extending from the empiricist demand that knowing be perception to the idealist, conceptualist, or rationalist demand that knowing be a kind of intellectual perception of forms, concepts, or ideas.3 In the late Middle Ages, the conceptualism of Duns Scotus, which posited an unconscious look at the nexus of concepts, was countered by the skeptical reaction of nominalism. This effected a dialectic

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in philosophy, which continued in the modern period with the rivalry of rationalists and empiricists until Kant’s critique cancelled them out. Kant’s severe limitation of understanding to rule-making for the objectification of nature as a mechanism and his proscription of metaphysics as a science have had profound impact on subsequent intellectual history. Positivism, pragmatism, and existentialism, for example have all operated in different and complex ways under Kant’s restriction of the scope of reason because they have all accepted Kant’s assumption that metaphysics must be grounded on an (impossible) intellectual intuition of essences. Postmodern criticism breaks from “modernity” conceived as Cartesian and Kantian culture, but instead of offering an alternative to the pervasive confrontation theory of truth, it succumbs to skepticism. Lonergan struggled to break out of the framework of the confrontation theory of truth as he examined the actual cognitional practice behind the achievements of twentieth century science and sought to establish the proper role of experience, concepts, and judgments. His breakthrough came, as we have pointed out in the Introduction, in his encounter with Aquinas. In rehabilitating Aquinas’ sophisticated, if somewhat unthematic, theory of knowledge with its emphasis on the role of insight and judgment, LonÂ� ergan developed a radical alternative to the confrontation theory of truth. It is from this perspective that Lonergan articulated his philosophy of historical existence and tackled problems of historical method and historical objectivity. Lonergan, as we have seen, identifies a basic horizon of historical existence with the self-transcending process of inquiry and its cognitive, moral, and spiritual standards that embrace the domains of common sense, science, scholarship, art, and symbol. These standards are operative in the dialectic of performance and interpretation, which makes history an intrinsically hermeneutical enterprise. This enterprise, which encompasses the horizons of individuals, the horizons of communities, and the mutual conditioning of individuals and communities, can be distorted by bias, and hence arises the dialectic of progress and decline. With this ontological philosophy of history as background, we have examined Lonergan’s epistemological and his speculative philosophies of history. What harvest have we yielded? First, Lonergan recognizes the historicity of the cultural superstructure of science, philosophy, and scholarship in the sense that the superstructure is a genuine movement within the drama of history, an interpretation of the self-interpretations inherent in historical life. The cultural superstructure thus reflects the critical imperative of hermeneutics: to be an authentic manifestation of the desire to know and the intention of the good. And it is

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an interpretation—an interpretive encounter with the self-interpretations of the past—that can enter into future performance. Lonergan confronts the members of the cultural superstructure with the prospect that they should have aspirations well beyond the delights of intellectual hedonism, refined aestheticism, and dry pedantry. Questioning must not be emasculated into mere curiosity, and inquiry must flower into praxis. Second, Lonergan, in one of his most original contributions, views historicity as an inner component within the cultural superstructure, for he argues that, in practice, the numerous specializations of scholarship, human science, philosophy, and theology can fashion a cooperative, functional relationship in which some encounter the past, others direct past problems to the present search for philosophical foundations, and others, in light of those foundations, develop traditions to meet future social and cultural challenges. Third, in formulating his scheme of functional specialties, Lonergan stresses that historical objectivity mediates—but by its own necessity leads to—historical evaluation. Historical objectivity and historical evaluation, he urges, are not opposites but complementary partners in the wider hermeneutical project of the cultural superstructure. And implicit in his thought—and indicative of the same spirit of forging a solid link between the scientific and the existential—is the idea that historical analysis and historical assessment mediate dramatic narrative, which would return historiography, in a critical and thoughtful fashion, back to its vital origins in the primordial drama of history. Likewise implicit in his writings is the conviction that all the specialized fields of historical studies mediate the ongoing, always incomplete, enterprise of universal history. Historical scholarship, too, mediates philosophy, bearing witness to the historicity of philosophical truth. Fourth, given the hermeneutical reality of historical existence, Lonergan puts a premium on critical investigation of the history of thought. The sharp edge of his cognitional theory promises to cut through much of epistemological obfuscation associated with the particular fields of the history of thought. His notion of scotosis, for example, can be fruitfully applied to psychohistory, but any reductionist temptations are countered by his equally powerful notion of the teleological élan vital of the psyche, welling up in dreams, symbols, and myths. His brief, but suggestive, remarks on the intellectual content of art, music, drama, and poetry could be expanded by experts in cultural history to serve as a programmatic declaration of the critical possibilities inherent in that field of scholarship. His horizon analysis captures for the edification of intellectual and cultural historians the polymorphous shape of the elusive Zeitgeist, which

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historically may range from one of firm definition to one of chaotic proportions. His discussion of heuristic insights clarifies the heuristic nature of unit-ideas, enabling the sensitive historian of ideas to walk a prudent line between a rigid nominalism and a dazzling conceptualism. His idea of the dialectic of positions and counterpositions, a kind of prolegomena to the history of philosophy, when interpreted in the correct, nondogmatic spirit, is surely one of the more bold and ambitious reflections on the history of philosophy since the speculation of Hegel—but one without the latter’s pretensions to a gnostic, God’s-eye view of the ultimate axis and absolute meaning of philosophical development. Finally, drawing upon Lonergan’s statements and his methodological orientation, one can envision the methodical cooperation of psychohistory, cultural history, history of ideas, intellectual history, and history of philosophy in the critical endeavor of discerning the crucial philosophical assumptions concretely operative in the history of thought. Fifth, Lonergan salvages a legitimate speculative philosophy of history as he establishes the theoretical foundations of the history of differentiated consciousness. He does not, however, lay out his grand-scale ideal-types of the Age of Myth, the Age of Theory, and the Age of Interiority as a procrustean bed, but rather intends them to be the groundwork for patient, specialized research in the history of consciousness. Lonergan invites widespread, continuing efforts—of the sort where Voegelin’s monumental project sets a standard—perpetually fed by the creative interplay of philosophy and scholarship. And, sixth, to reiterate the plea of Frederick Crowe, there is the fundamental imperative of simply implementing Lonergan’s method.4 To the extent that we would cultivate the grove of historical scholarship by employing the tools and practices of Lonergan’s method, we might anticipate a landscape transformed by the more conspicuous presence of certain invigorated species: an evaluative historiography sensitive to the epochal struggle of understanding against biases and their existential roots; dialectical analysis of historical works; a critical history of thought sustained by the explanatory and evaluative nourishment running through all its increasingly differentiated branches; and a history of consciousness whose theoretical roots are fed by the cooperative effort of specialized scholars. The fruits of Lonergan’s labors will be seen in what he calls the “lower blade” of hermeneutics,” namely, the specialized historical disciplines.5 His “upper blade” of methodology and grand-scale ideal-types is meant to be a “common ground” on which persons of intelligence could meet. It aims not to replace those historical researches but to invite the researchers in the historical disciplines to a “spontaneous collaboration.”6

Notes

Introduction Quotation from Bernard J.F. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 23. Citations within the text of Lonergan’s works will include the author’s name only on first reference. 1. Insight, 7. 2. On the “heap of broken images,” see T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland, in Collected Poems, 1909–1962, 53; on the “phantoms of certitude,” see Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper: A Study and a Confession, chap. 7; on the “triumph of becoming,” see Franklin L. Baumer, Modern European Thought: Continuity and Change in Ideas, 1600–1950, 402–16. 3. See Karl Löwith, Meaning in History, chap. 5; J. H. Brumfitt, Voltaire, Historian; Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas, 145–216; Bruce Mazlish, The Riddle of History: the Great Speculators from Vico to Freud. 4. Emphasizing, for example, the “space of dispersion” and “discontinuity” in history would seem to head in the direction of its deconstruction. See Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, 10–11. On the rise of academic history, see G. P. Gooch History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century. The most speculative treatment of history by an existentialist is that of Karl Jaspers in his Origin and Goal of History, where he argues for an “axial period” of history. 5. On the neo-Kantian idea of history, see George Iggers, The German Conception of History, 144–59; Maurice Mandelbaum, The Problem of Historical Knowledge: An Answer to Relativism, 119–47. For a critical encounter with linguistic historicism, see Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy. 6. For a discussion of the Post-Modern critique of foundationalism in relation to the somewhat “existentialist” approach of Voegelin, whose philosophy of history is in many ways consonant with that of Lonergan, see Peter A. Petrakis and Cecil L. Eubanks, ed., Eric Voegelin’s Dialogue with the Postmoderns: Searching for Foundations. For comparison of Lonergan and Voegelin, see Thomas J. McPartland, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, chaps. 10–11. For analysis of Lonergan and PostModernism, see Fred Lawrence, “The Fragility of Consciousness: Lonergan and the Postmodern Concern for the Other,” 55–94. 7. See Einstein’s Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics. 8. For a probing and detailed account of one of the great intellectual journeys of 157

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Notes to Pages 3–12

discovery of the twentieth century, see William Mathews, Lonergan’s Quest: A Study of Desire in the Authoring of Insight. Lonergan’s problem-solving led him eventually to four sets of major insights: that understanding requires insight into images, that insight is distinct from concepts, that reflective insights ground judgment as a virtually unconditioned and that insight into insight grasps inquiry as a structure of cognitional levels. 9. Ibid., chaps. 8–12; Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas. 10. Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism. 11. Insight, 3–4, 6–7. 12. See Mathews, Lonergan’s Quest, chap. 5, 88–92; Bernard Lonergan, “Analytic Concept of History,” 5–35. Lonergan himself refers to his early essays on the analytic concept of history in Bernard J. F. Lonergan, A Second Collection, 271–72.

Chapter 1 Basic Horizon and Historiography 1. Verbum, 3. 2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time; The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 3–35, 115–45. 3. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, pt. 1; Nicholas Plants, “Lonergan and Taylor: A Critical Integration,” Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 19, no. 1 (2001): 143–72. 4. See Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs; Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, chap. 7; Andrew Beards, Method in Metaphysics: Lonergan and the Future of Analytic Philosophy, 46–56. 5. Insight, 440; Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics, chap. 2; Order and History, 5:28–33. Lonergan is aware that late in life, under the influence of Heidegger, Husserl moved from pure phenomenology to a consideration of the LeÂ� benswelt. See Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism, 177–83, chap. 11; Michael McCarthy, The Crisis of Philosophy, chap. 3. 6. On horizon, see Phenomenology and Logic, 205, 288 (concrete synthesis), 198–99, 288 (bounded by questions); Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Method in Theology, 235 (horizon defined) ; 79 (community), 236–37 (multiple horizons). On technology, economy, polity, and culture as objective order of society, see Insight, 232–37. 7. See Insight, 658 (question as source of transcendence), 650–53 (tension of limitation and transcendence), 5, 12–13 (verification and personal reflection); on cognitional theory as not radically revisable, see ibid., 359–60; Method, 18–20. 8. On Lonergan’s distinct notion of consciousness as self-presence, see Insight, 344– 52; Method, 6–9; Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Collection, 209–10; McPartland, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, chap. 1; Louis Roy, Mystical Consciousness: Western Perspectives and Dialogue with Japanese Thinkers, chap. 1. 9. For the dynamic interplay of images, insights, and concepts, see Insight, 31–33; B. J. F. Lonergan, Understanding and Being: The Halifax Lectures on Insight, 21–28, 36–43. 10. On insight as the pivot between image and concept (i.e., the concrete and the

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abstract), see Insight, 30; on insight as release of the tension of inquiry, see ibid., 28; on idea as the content of understanding, see ibid., 667; on insight and sustaining flow of expression, see Method, 255; on the concept as a formulation of insight, see Insight, 32–33, Verbum, chap. 1. 11. On “genuine objectivity” as “authentic subjectivity,” see Method, 265, 292; on the “transcendental precepts,” see ibid, 20. 12. On reflective insight and judgment, see Verbum, chap. 2; Insight, chaps. 9–10. 13. On the role of belief, which is in symbiotic relation to “immanently generated knowledge,” see Insight, 725–40; Method, 42–47. In Lonergan’s stress on the importance of belief in both common sense and science, his viewpoint might converge with Charles Peirce’s notion of truth as heuristically present in the ideal community of inquirers, a notion Habermas adopts in his critical social theory. See Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests; Christian Jacobs-Vandegeer, “Insight into the Better Argument: Consciousness, Communication and Criticizability in Habermas and Lonergan,” 69–70. 14. Collection, 213. 15. On moral inquiry, see Method, 30–41 16. On progress and decline, see Insight, 8, 259–60; Method, 52–55; on “positions” and “counterpositions,” see Insight, 413. 17. Insight, 265. On the “dialectic of history” and the “existential gap,” see Phenomenology and Logic, 209–12, 281–84, 298–310; on “functional specialties,” see Method, chap. 5. On the “cultural infrastructure” and the “cultural superstructure,” see Second Collection, 21, 91–92, 103–4. Lonergan’s notion of critical historiography in the dialectic of history bears a substantial relation to Habermas’s notion of critical theory as grounded in the “emancipatory interest” operative when inquirers submit to the norms of the “ideal communication situation.” See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols.; Knowledge and Human Interests, chaps. 5–6. Joining Lonergan in stressing the possibility and importance of objectivity and in taking seriously epistemological concerns, Habermas espouses a “Kantian pragmatism” as an alternative to “representative realism,” while Lonergan espouses a “critical realism” based on the decisive role of insight in understanding, judging, and evaluating. See Jürgen Habermas, Truth and Justification, 10, 30.; Jacobs-Vandegeer, “Insight into the Better Argument,” 454–74. 18. Gerardus van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty, 13. 19. For the distinction, see Method, 175; Bernard J. F. Lonergan, “Philosophy of History,” 73–74. 20. Herodotus, The Histories, 1.1. 21. Insight, 33–69, 103–39, 205–6, 259–62, 437–42, 448–51. 22. Method, 157–58. 23. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics in Modernity Without Restraint: The Political Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, 109. See Insight, 261, 191–295, 538 ff.; R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 210–17. 24. One may wish to call this elementary understanding a kind of “common sense,” as the term is used by Thomas Reid. See Voegelin, Anamnesis, 410–12. But it should be noted that “common sense,” as Lonergan defines it, varies from relative horizon to relative horizon, is subject to various forms of bias, and is notoriously shortâ•‚sighted. See Insight, 4, 441. 25. On the spoudaios, see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1105b5–8, 1113a29–35, 1176a17

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ff. See Second Collection, 82; Voegelin, Modernity Without Restraint [The New Science of Politics], 138–39; Eric Voegelin, Order and History, 3.354. On conversion, see Plato, Republic, 51:8Câ•‚D. “Conversion” is a Latinized form of periagoge, which means “turning about” (from the darkness of the cave to the light of the Good). See Werner Jaeger, Paideia, 2.295 ff.: In his discussion of The Republic Jaeger summarizes Plato’s emphasis on the priority of understanding the person: “We started out with Plato to find a state. Instead we have found a man [Socrates].” Ibid., 2.354. 26. David Tracy, The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan, 133. 27. See n. 7 above. 28. On the desire to know and the intention of the good, see Insight, 372; Method, 34 ff.; Second Collection, 83. On the desire to know and the intention of the good as one basic orientation of consciousness, see Insight, 584, 623, 637, 646–47; Method, 38, 94, 122, 340; Second Collection, 82, 84. 29. On objectivity not a look, see Method, 262–63; Insight, 276–78, 344–46, 366–97, 431, 437–41, 449–50, 519, 604–5, 657–58, 669. On objectivity rooted in intelligence and reasonableness, see Insight, 404–5, 407; Method, 35, 263. Compare with Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge. On objectivity as authentic subjectivity, see n. 11 above. Italics added in quote. On moral objectivity, see Method, 35; Second Collection, 83. 30. The basic horizon of operations identified, Method, 7; the operations as normative, ibid., 18; Insight, 404; the operations as source of progress, ibid, 5–9, 259–60. 31. See Method, 274. On Gadamer and Lonergan, see Fred Lawrence, “Self-Knowledge in History in Gadamer and Lonergan,” 167–217; “Gadamer and Lonergan: A Dialectical Comparison.” 32. Andrew Beards, Objectivity and Historical Understanding; William Joseph Zanardi, “Transcendental Method and the Crisis of Historicism.” 33. See Insight., pp. 555–56, 569–70. 34. Method, 18–19. 35. On relative horizons, see especially, Method, chap. 3, 235–37; Phenomenology and Logic, pts. 2–3. On patterns of experience, see Insight, 204–12. On realms of meaning, see Method, 81–85. On the objective levels of society, see Insight, 232–34; Phenomenology and Logic, 210, 301–3; n. 6 above. On differentiation, see Insight, 594–95; Method, 85–99, 302–18. 36. Wilhelm Dilthey, Pattern and Meaning in History, chaps. 5–6; R. E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schliermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer, 100–114; H. A. Hodges, The Philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey; Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey, Philosopher of the Human Studies; D. E. Linge, “Historicity and Hermeneutic: A Study of Contemporary Hermeneutical Theory,” pt. 1. 37. For analysis of the complexity of history under the notion of “dialectic,” see McPartland, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, chap. 3; Robert Doran, Theology and the Dialectics of History. 38. Collection, 222–23. See Jean Piaget, Structuralism. Lonergan differs from Piaget in the former’s emphasis on the selfâ•‚scrutiny of the subject. See Piaget’s discussion of subjectivity, ibid., 138–40. Lonergan refers to Piaget in Method, 27–29. 39. Method, 217 ff. While the term “perspectivism” is used by Lonergan specifically with reference to historiography, it is also applicable to the history written about, to the “historicity of human thought and action.” Ibid., 325.


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40. The phrase is Hegel’s. G.W.F. Hegel, Reason in History, 27. 41. This is one aspect of the “dialectical” process of history. See McPartland, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, chap. 3. 42. Insight, 470–77; Mathews, Lonergan’s Quest, 377–80, with direct parallels to Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution. 43. On pre-critical history, see Method, 185–87; on rewriting critical history, see ibid., 192, 215. 44. Insight, p. 261. 45. Ibid., p. 8. 46. On the functional specialties, see Method, 125–46, pt. 2, esp. pp. 364–66. On the human sciences, see ibid, 180, 364–65. 47. See McPartland, Lonergan’s Philosophy of Historical Existence, chap. 7.

Chapter 2 Critique of Historical Reason 1. On relative horizons, see Method, chap. 3, 235–37; Phenomenology and Logic, pts. 2–3; on patterns of experience, see Insight, 204–12; on realms of meaning, see Method, 81–85; on the objective order of society, see Insight, 232–34; Phenomenology and Logic, 210, 301–03.on development and differentiation, see Insight, 594–95; Method, 85–99, 302–18; on reference to the sociology of knowledge, ibid., 223, where Lonergan cites, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. 2. For analysis of the complexity of history under the notion of “dialectic,” see McPartland, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, chap. 3; Robert Doran, Theology and the Dialectics of History. 3. For references, see n. 46 in chapter 1 above. Historiography in “doctrines” (or possibly “systematics”) will be informed by a “foundational” philosophical perspective but will also be mediated by evaluative history and “dialectical” criticism of historiography, by narrative, explanatory, and descriptive histories, by exegesis, and by “research”—thus promoting historical objectivity in philosophically informed historiography and guarding against narrow partisanship. Samples of this kind of historiography would be Lonergan’s historical comments in Insight on various philosophers in light of his foundational discovery of the role of insight in cognition and is an attempt to develop that position. Lonergan would encourage such historiography on a larger and much more sustained scale. He sees, for example, his work on Aquinas as “settling a preliminary fact and indicating elementary landmarks” that could serve as the basis for historiography: “From the writings of Aquinas one can extend inquiry to other writers, prior, contemporary, subsequent, eventually to invite some historian of the stature of M. Gilson to describe the historical experiment of understanding understanding and thinking thought.” Verbum, 226. This might be an example of “a retrospective expansion in the various genetic series of discoveries”—a history of a pure line of progress. Insight, 588–89. Conversely, philosophically-informed historiography can investigate the historical influence of such “counterpositions” as the conceptualism of Scotus: “While M. Gilson . . . has done splendid work on Scotist origins, there is needed an explanation of Scotus influence. . . .” Verbum, 39 n. 126. The range of

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such a history would be extensive since Lonergan contends that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is essentially a critique of the human mind as conceived by Duns Scotus. Ibid., 125–26. 4. Leopold von Ranke, Histories of the Latin and Germanic Nations from 1494–1514, 57. 5. On external criticism, see Harry Elmer Barnes, A History of Historical Writing, 239– 44.The judgment on von Ranke is that of Barnes, A History of Historical Writing, 244–46; for selections from Niebuhr and Ranke, see Stern, Varieties of History, 46–62; Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century, chaps. 6–7, 13, 18–27; James Westfall Thompson, History of Historical Writing, 2. chaps. 37, 61–62, 67. For speculative and partisan histories, see Barnes, A History of Historical Writing, chaps. 8–9. Gooch, History and Historians, chaps. 8–9; Stern, Varieties of History, excerpts from Thierry, Macaulay, Michelet, historical materialism; P. Gardiner, ed., Theories of History, excerpts from Buckle, Mill, Comte; Mazlish, The Riddle of History, chaps. 4–5; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History; Emil Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension of Hegel’s Thought, chap. 6; Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 25–63; Walter Kaufmann, Hegel: A Reinterpretation, chap. 7; George Armstrong Kelly, Idealism, Politics and History: Sources of Hegelian Thought, pts. on Fichte and Hegel; Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, 29–49; Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 224–48; Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, 7.1 chap. 7; Paul Collins Hayner, Reason and Existence; Schelling’s Philosophy of History; J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study of Victorian Social Theory; Thomas Pressly, Americans Interpret Their Civil War. 6. See Carl Becker, Detachment and the Writing of History; B.T. Wilkens, Carl Becker; Charlotte W. Smith, Carl Becker: On History and the Climate of Opinion; Lonergan refers to Becker in Method, 195–96, 203–4, 215–16., 221–22, 232. W. H. Walsh, Philosophy of History, 105. 7. Method, 143. 8. On historical knowing not a look, see ibid., 157; Insight, 603–8; Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 269–74. On “fusion of horizons,” see Method, 274. On basic horizon, compare with Gadamer’s statement that “it is, in fact, a single horizon that embraces everything contained in historical consciousness.” Truth and Method, 271. 9. Insight, 588. 10. Insight, 588, 605, 609. The notion of the universal viewpoint, given its first grand formulation in Insight, underwent development as Lonergan expanded his intentionality analysis, incorporated aspects of existentialist thought, acknowledged more clearly the common-sense understanding of the Geisteswissenschaften, and fused transcendental method with functional specialization. Although the universal viewpoint becomes thematic in the functional specialty of dialectics, it is normative in all the functional specialties that encounter the past because it expresses the norms of basic horizon. Hence the principles of the universal viewpoint formulated in Insight apply to all those functional specialties. For a definitive treatment of the development of Lonergan’s notion of the universal viewpoint, see Ivo Coelho, Hermeneutics and Method: The “Universal Viewpoint” in Bernard Lonergan. 11. Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanto-History, and History, 114.


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12. On the range of possible meanings, see Insight, 601; on constrictions of the universal viewpoint, see ibid, 607. 13. Ibid., 610–11; Method, pp .216–18, where Lonergan contrasts “perspectivism” and “relativism.” 14. Method, pp. 165–66; Insight, pp. 607–8; R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 282–302. 15. Insight., 588; on the reproduction of experiences, insights, judgments, and evaluations, see, ibid, 602. 16. Ibid., 600–601. “For the relativism with which hermeneutics has been afflicted arises, not because scholars have been neglecting the lower blade that consists in the extraordinary array of techniques for dealing with the documents and monuments of the past, but because there has not been available an appropriate upper blade. In consequence they either laboured under the delusion that their inquiry was voraussetz ungslos or else operated on the assumptions that did not square with the single legitimate assumption, namely, that in principle and under appropriate reservations a correct interpretation is possible.” Ibid, 600. 17. See ibid., pp. 588–590, 598, 602–3, 611–12. 18. Ibid., 600. Lonergan stresses this second point and the third point below in his discussion of the upper blade. 19. On viewpoints as positions or counterpositions, see ibid., pp. 588–90, 598, 621, 614; on progress and decline, see ibid., 588–90, 601, 602, 610–11, 614; on the definition of the universal viewpoint, ibid, 587;on stages of meaning, see ibid., p. 589; see also Method, 85–99. 20. Insight, 592–95, 600–601, 603, 609–12, 615. Lonergan mentions the following levels of expression, corresponding to the levels of conscious intentionality: first, intersubjective, symbolic, artistic, and linguistic expressions of meaning are geared toward evoking response to feelings, moods, sentiments, images, and associations; secondly, literary expression of meaning employs resources of language to convey insights indirectly and technical scientific expression of meaning is directly concerned with a reader’s understanding; thirdly, philosophic expression of meaning is directly concerned with a reader’s judgment; and, fourthly, practical expressions of meaning, such as wishes and commands, aim at volitional responses. Ibid., pp. 592–94; Method, chap. 3. 21. Method, 172–73; see also Insight, 588–89, 611. For an example of a sophisticated effort of such hermeneutical retrieval of ancient Egyptian culture, see R. T. Rundle Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt; Voegelin, Order and History, I, chap. 3, esp. 122–25. 22. Method, 191; Insight, 610–11. 23. Insight, pp. 612, 616. 24. Lonergan’s language about the universal viewpoint in Insight may seem to restrict it to exegesis and critical intellectual history, but, in fact, it extends to the entire field of meaning, which, as Lonergan demonstrates, is a constitutive element of most of historical life, for at the core of the drama of history is the search for meaning itself. On the wide scope of the universal viewpoint, see Method, 153 n. On “meaning, “see ibid., chap. 3. The researcher’s attentiveness operates within the universal viewpoint. The systematic thinker develops positions retrieved through “interpretation,” “history,” and “dialectics” and affirmed in “doctrines” through the filter of “foundations.”

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25. For substantive discussion of Lonergan’s treatment of historical method and historical objectivity, see Zanardi, “Transcendental Method and the Crisis of Historicism,” chaps. 4–5; Andrew Beards, Objectivity and Historical Understanding, which focuses on Lonergan and the analytic school; on Lonergan and analytic philosophy in general, see Joseph Fitzpatrick, Philosophical Encounters: Lonergan and the Analytic Tradition. 26. Method, 189, 202–3. 27. Ibid, 203. 28. Ibid., 186–91. Lonergan describes the cumulative process of developing historical understanding as heuristic (in search of an unknown), ecstatic (self-transcending), selective (attending to relevant data), constructive (organizing data through insight), critical (self-correcting), reflective, and judicial. 29. Ibid., p. 192. 30. Ibid., pp. 187, 193–94. 31. Insight, 605. 32. Method, 199–201. Lonergan refers to Ernst Bernheim, Lehrbuch der historischen Methode and Charles Victor Langlois and C. Seignobos, Introduction to the Study of History. See Stern, Varieties of History, 16, 20, 120–37, 209–23, 314–28, excerpts from Buckle, Bury, and Beard; Gardiner, Theories of History, excerpts from Buckle, Mill, Comte; Mazlish, The Riddle of History, chap. on Comte; Thompson, History of Historical Writing, 11, chap. 55. Both Carl Becker and R. G. Collingwood attacked the notion that the historian had merely to present all of the facts and let them speak for themselves (Collingwood, in his Idea of History, called this position “scissors and paste history”). They both emphasized the constructive activities of the historian. For Lonergan’s references to Becker and Collingwood, see Method, 203–6. 33. Method, 198–99, 201–3. 34. Insight, p. 604. Lonergan, however, does grant that the artist and teacher have the legitimate educational task of reconstituting “the sights and sounds, the feelings and sentiments, that help us recapture the past.” Ibid. 35. See Method, p. 206. 36. Insight, p. 585; Collingwood, Idea of History, 282–302; Method, p. 166. 37. Collingwood, Idea of History, 300–301; Method, 165–66. 38. For a discussion of the neo-Kantian idea of history, see Iggers, German Idea of History, 144–59; Maurice Mandelbaum, The Problem of Historical Knowledge, 119–47. Since Lonergan emphasizes the constitutive role of judgment in knowing, he rejects the Hegelian philosophy of history, which identifies mind with reality. For a defense by practicing historians of historical truth, objectivity, and narrative in the face of postmodernist attacks from Foucault and Derrida and their historian followers, see Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, chaps. 6–7. 39. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 267–68. Possibly because Lonergan sees a closer, more intimate relationship than does Gadamer between method and the human hermeneutical situation since Lonergan does not conceive of method in Gadamer’s Cartesian fashion, Lonergan can propose the functional specialty of “dialectics,” which is concerned with the evaluative interests of “effective-history.”‘ 40. Method, 213. 41. Ibid., 153–54; Insight, 595–600. 42. Insight, 593–95.


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43. Method, p. 157. Since interpretation, for the most part, is a sophisticated extension of common-sense understanding, the presuppositions that allow for successful interpretation may be unacknowledged. And when common-sense horizons change, when language, tastes, concerns, and interests change, so will the presuppositions underlying the interpretations change—and, with them, the interpretations as well. This is the “perspectivism” inherent in hermeneutics. 44. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 274–78. For a presentation of Gadamer’s analysis and defense of it against the charges of Emilio Betti, Die Hermeneutik als allgemeine Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften, and Eric D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, appendix. 2, see Linge “Historicity and Hermeneutic,” 396–429. 45. Insight, 606; for the “principle of the empty head,”‘ see Method, 157–58. 46. Insight, 605. 47. Method, 168. Lonergan’s division of these operations into functional specialties does not preclude the same individual from interpreting an author’s analysis of a problem, from evaluating that analysis, and from studying the problem in its own right. Ibid., 168–69. 48. See ibid., 161; Insight, 769–70. 49. Method, 161–62. 50. On the total range of possible meanings, see ibid., 156; on the historical context of an author, see Insight, 603. 51. Ibid., p. 612–17. For an attack on the assumption of systematic coherence and for a demonstration of the fallacy at work in studies in the history of political theory, see Quintin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969), 15–22. 52. Insight, pp. 613–14. 53. Ibid., pp. 613, 616. 54. Method, 158–61 (quotes on 163). Lonergan mentions Collingwood and Gadamer’s insistence that to understand a text one must understand the problems and questions to which the answers presented in the text are directed. Ibid., 164; Collingwood, Idea of History, 281; R. G. Collingwood, Autobiography, 130; Gadamer, Truth and Method, 7. While it is possible to construct rules of hermeneutics or exegesis out of recognition of the way in which texts are constituted, Lonergan cautions that “one does not understand the text because one has observed the rules, but, on the contrary, one observes the rules in order to arrive at an understanding of texts.” Method, 159. 55. Method, 162–63. 56. For criticism of Ricoeur’s Kantian assumptions, which tie a noose around his many splendid insights into hermeneutics, see Piscitelli, “Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Religious Symbols,” 275–313. For a Kantian-influenced criticism of Lonergan, see Wolfhart Pannenberg, “History and Meaning in Bernard Lonergan’s Approach to Theological Method,” 88–100. 57. Method, 162–65. Lonergan argues that those thinkers, such as Bultmann, who stand in the Kantian tradition do not sharply distinguish, as he does, between developments of understanding and developments of judging. Ibid., 158 n. 2. 58. Ibid., 170, 172–73. 59. See Ibid., pp. 178–79, 230. 60. Ibid., p. 179. Lonergan refers to Droysen’s use of the military metaphor in ibid.,

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199, citing P. Hunermann, Der Durchbuch geschichtlichen Denkens im 19. Jahrhundert, 112 ff. 61. Method, 179. 62. On basic and special history, see Method, 128. An example of basic history would be William L. Langer, An Encyclopedia of World History. 63. This is not to say, as Maurice Mandelbaum points out, that special fields may not have sequences defined initially by the subject matter and hence have a strong descriptive character. See Maurice Mandelbaum, The Anatomy of Historical Knowledge, 33–35. Special history, for Lonergan, embraces technology, culture, and society; it thus covers both what Mandelbaum calls “special history” (focusing on culture, technology, and certain aspects of society) and “general history” (focusing on an organized community in control of a given territory). See Ibid., pp. 11–14. It would be within the compass of special history, as Lonergan conceives of it, to deal with the explanation of an event, principally in one specific area of historical life (e.g., political, economic, cultural) as well as with the explanation of an event of greater import (such as the fall of Rome), extending to several specific areas (military, political, social classes, cultural). It would also include the interpretation of periods and of changes in dominant patterns. The explanatory “why” could point to teleological concerns insofar as causes very often could include meanings, values, and purposes, but the “why” could also be “why X is Y,” which points to formal cause (or efficient cause). See Verbum, 26–29. 64. Method, 128. For example, see Arnold Toynbee, Mankind and Mother Earth: A Narrative History of the World; L.S. Stavrionos, A Global History: The Human Heritage; William Hardy McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community; Hugh Thomas, A History of the World. Obviously a continuum exists between specialized history and general-universal-history: The integration of specialized histories can cover larger and larger geographical areas (France, Europe, the West) and wider and wider chronological periods (late Middle Ages, Middle Ages, post-classical Europe). 65. Method, 199. Simply to describe a sequence of events may be to exhibit causal connections. See Mandelbaum, Anatomy of Historical Knowledge, 32. 66. Method, 199. 67. Lonergan seems to endorse Meinecke’s view that every historical work is concerned principally with either causal connections or values. Ibid., 245. 68. Insight, 609. On the primacy of explanatory relations, see ibid., 3, 37, 417 419, 609. On intelligible patterns in historical data, see Method. 190, 394. 69. Method, pp. 230–34. For discussion of historical explanation, see Gardiner, Theories of History, 344–443. For an influential treatment of historical causality in terms of scientific law, see Carl G. Hempel, “The Function of General Laws in History,”344–56. For a defense of history as an extension of common sense, see Barzun, Clio and the Doctors, chap. 5. 70. On the use and dangers of historical analogy, see Method., 225–27; on the danger of analogy for common sense in general, see Insight, 198–99, 312–14, 319–20. Henri Marrou in The Meaning of History, 157–63, argues that the historian uses concepts of universal applicability, such as the notion that a person (for example, Pericles) remains the same person, an identity, over time. But he warns that the historian must be on guard against employing concepts of less than universal applicability, such as the idea that victory in war means killing more of the enemy than one loses. (He points out that


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for the ancient Greeks victory meant occupying a territory.) Ibid., 160. Lonergan cites Marrou’s study with approval in Method, 207–8. 71. Method, 228. 72. Ibid., 219–20. 73. Ibid., 179–80, 219. 74. Ibid., 180. 75. Ibid., 227. 76. On the heuristic advantage of ideal-types, see ibid., 228. Lonergan, relying on Marrou, elaborates the difficulty in working out appropriate ideal-types: “the richer and the more illuminating the construct, the greater the difficulty of applying it; the thinner and looser the construct, the less it is able to contribute much to history.” Ibid. Here Lonergan suggests that Toynbee’s A Study of History might be regarded as a source-book of ideal-types, providing the materials from which carefully formulated ideal-types might be derived. Ibid. 77. Lonergan refers to Marrou’s discussion of Coulanges and of the use of idealtypes in historical explanation. Ibid. See Marrou, Meaning in History, 167–73. 78. See Method., 85–99, 157–262, 284–85, 287–88, 292–93, 302–18. 79. Ibid., xii, 285–88. 80. Marrou, Meaning in History, 201, cited by Lonergan, Method, 229. 81. Verbum, 37. 82. See Insight, 444, 725–35; Method, pp. 41–47, 79, 255, 357; Collection, 226–27, 233– 34; Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Philosophy of God and Theology, p. 58. 83. See Insight, 242 for Lonergan’s definition of dialectic. For its scope, see n. 37, chap.1, above. 84. Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Topics in Education: The Cincinnati Lectures of 1959, 313–14. 85. See, for example, William H. McNeill. Plagues and People. 86. Insight, 643–47. 87. Method, 128. General-universal-history would fit under the category of what Mandelbaum calls interpretive history; it would be a unique, grand-scale interpretive history, focusing on significant trends. See Mandelbaum, Anatomy of Historical Knowledge, 28–30. 88. For suggestive remarks, see Topics in Education, 231–32, 257. 89. For the relation between narrative history and fiction, see Method, 219, where Lonergan refers to Collingwood, Idea of History, 246. An example of dramatic narrative on a very specialized topic is Gerard Mattingly, The Armada; a dramatic presentation of Greek intellectual history is Werner Jaeger’s Paideia, esp. 2. chap. 1; a classical stylist in political history, among the great modern historical writers studied by Peter Gay in his Style in History, is Leopold von Ranke. 90. “Cosmopolis” is Lonergan’s notion, borrowed from the Stoics, of that aspect of culture correlative to the imperatives of basic horizon. Insight, 263–67. Cosmopolis is “a dimension of consciousness, a heightened grasp of historical origins, a discovery of historical responsibilities.” Ibid., 266. As an aspect of culture, it must speak to the heart as well as the mind. Ibid., 261. See McPartland, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, chap. 6. 91. Hayden White. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, 7–11; Frye, Anatomy of Criticism.

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92. Clearly, the same historian could do both original explanatory (or descriptive) work and express the results in narrative style; but the narrative would still be mediated by the explanatory (or descriptive) study, and the narrative would still carry additional, dramatic insights. 93. The same objectives would apply to “popular” histories, such as Barbara Tuchman’s study of the calamitous fourteenth-century, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. The genre, we believe, ought to be vigorously defended provided its works are directed at the cultivated historical imagination of the educated public and not at the emotions and fancies of the masses; individual works in the genre should be open to the same level of critical review as any other historical work. 94. See Gay, Style in History, who argues that history is both a science and an art: “Historical narrative without analysis is trivial, historical analysis without narration is incomplete.” Ibid., p. 189. See also Barzun, Clio and the Doctors, 116–18, who discerns an essential link between history and literature; thus he concludes that “effective history must bear the impress of a single synthesizing mind.” Ibid., p. 142. Paul Ricoeur argues for history as a fusion of narrative and explanation, which differentiates history from fiction. Paul Ricouer, Time and Narrative, vol. 1. 95. Method, 246, 249–50. 96. Evaluation of persons, ibid., 252; of philosophical, ethical, religious and claims and their impact on communities and society, ibid., 248, 252, 365 (here evaluative human science joins evaluative historiography ); of tradition, ibid., 162; Insight, 265. 97. On moral judgment and hierarchy of values, see Method, 31–32, 36, 38, 360–61; on the self-correcting process of learning, see Insight, 197–98, 311–12, 314–16, 325, 328– 29, 370, 728. 98. Method, p. 250. Lonergan contrasts Burckhardt with Ranke, whose form of narrative was explanatory. See Gay, Style in History, for discussion of Gibbon, Macaulay, Ranke, and Burckhardt. On the task of historical narrative reaching down to the existential and aesthetic levels, see Topics in Education, 230. 99. For this existential triad of dread, flight, and belittling of higher value, see McPartland, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, 174–77. 100. For Cassirer, see n. 84 below, chap. 3; R. G. Collingwood, Idea of Nature; Idea of History; Eric Voegelin., From Enlightenment to Revolution; Order and History, 5 vols.;. The functional specialties of “interpretation,” “history,” and” dialectics” might be illustrated in the field of Platonic studies, respectively, by studies exclusively on Plato in the case of Paul Friedlander, Plato, 3 vols.; by explanatory history with obvious Platonic leanings in the case of Jaeger, Paideia, vols. 1–2; and by an explicit philosophic history highly laudatory of Plato in the case of Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 3. 101. See Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 68, 74, 246–47, 319–21. 102. Method, 249–50, 251. Evaluative historiography and dialectic analysis can continue in altered fashion within the different contexts of “doctrines,” “social policy,” and “systematics,” as mentioned above, n. 3. 103. Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason. 104. Method, 129, 254. 105. Ibid., pp. 129, 254. While the functional specialties of “research,” “interpreta-


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tion,” and “history” (and evaluative historiography) operate as sophisticated extensions of commonsense, dialectical analysis is decidedly more theoretical, Accordingly, the universal viewpoint, which in Insight was a component of metaphysics, in Lonergan’s notion of functional specialties resides primarily in dialectical analysis (though it is implicit in the other functional specialties). See Coelho, Hermeneutics and Method, chap. 12. 106. Method, 250; Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution; Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 1, The Rise of Modern Paganism. 107. Herbert Butterfield, “Moral Judgments in History,” 228–49; Isaiah Berlin, Historical Inevitability, secs. 3–4; Method, 230. 108. On Meinecke, Method, 233, 245; Stern, Varieties of History, 272. On Becker, Method, 245; Lonergan cites, Smith, Carl Becker, p. 117. 109. See Barzun, Clio and the Doctors, chap. 5. 110. See Method, 233, 246–47. 111. Ibid., 231–32; Smith, Carl Becker, 117; in Second Collection, 144 n. 11, Lonergan refers to Talcott Parsons’ discussion of Weber’s conscious commitment to the values of the intellectual disciplines in “The Role of Unity and Diversity in the Modern Intellectual Disciplines: Social Sciences,” 59. It would be a contradiction to do history and at the same time to hold a neutral or negative attitude toward the intellectual disciplines of the cultural superstructure. 112. Method, 232. 113. Ibid., 185, 230–31. Lonergan mentions the Prussian School as an example where partisanship hurt scholarship. Ibid., 186 n. 7. 114. Insight, 240, 543. 115. W. H. Walsh in his Philosophy of History, 100–108, outlines four factors making for disagreement among historians: 1) personal bias, 2) group prejudice, 3) conflicting theories of the relative importance of different kinds of causal factors, and 4) underlying philosophical conflicts. These factors should be compared with Lonergan’s treatment of the sources of bias and of conflicting intellectual and philosophical horizons. On the former, see Insight, 214–31, 244–53. 116. Method, 249–50, 365. 117. White, Metahistory, xi. For discussion and criticism, see Zanardi, “Transcendental Method and the Crisis of Historicism,” esp. chap. 1; Beards, Objectivity and Historical Understanding, 135–39, who suggests White straddles somewhere between Hume and Kant in a counterposition. See also Ricouer, Time and Narrative, 1.chap. 5. These works would be examples of dialectical analysis applied to another work of dialectical analysis. 118. See Introduction to White, Metahistory, for explanation of terms and extensive discussion. On his own approach as only one of many, see ibid., xii. The exclusion of epistemology, of course, reflects White’s own epistemological assumptions, perhaps a kind of subjective idealism that would seriously restrict the possibility of objectivity. 119. Method, p. 250. 120. White, Metahistory, p. x. 121. Method, 247, 253–54. 122. See n. 117 and n. 118 above.

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Chapter 3 History of Thought and Praxis Quotation from Insight, 256. 1. On culture in the more general sense, see Lonergan’s definition of the “cultural situation,” which, linked to the technical situation and the social situation, forms the objective historical situation: “Culture . . . is the current effective totality of immanently produced and symbolically communicated contents of imagination, emotion, and sentiment, of inquiry, insight, and conception, of reflection and judgment, and of evaluation, decision, and implementation.” Phenomenology and Logic, 209–10, 302. Closer to the notion of culture as self-interpretation is his definition of culture as “the set of meanings and values that inform a way of life.” Method, xi. Closer still is his description of culture, with respect to the question of what the drama of existence and what human being is all about: ”Culture is his capacity to ask, to reflect, to reach an answer that at once satisfies his intelligence and speaks to his heart.” Insight, 267. On culture in the strict sense, see also Second Collection, 102; Method, 32, 50–51; Insight, 621; Dennis Klein, “Dimensions of Culture in the Thought of Bernard Lonergan.” 2. See Maurice Mandelbaum, “History of Ideas, Intellectual History, History of Philosophy,” 47. From the perspective of Lonergan’s cognitional theory, the social monists would seem to fall into the epistemological trap of failing to appreciate the significance of judgment; this omission in cognitional theory would lead to a parallel omission in social theory, the failure to recognize distinct contexts and regions within human living. 3. Mandelbaum, “History of Ideas,” 48–50. See Method, 128, where Lonergan distinguishes between cultural history (art, literature, religion, language) and doctrinal history (science, history, philosophy, theology). 4. Mandelbaum, “History of Ideas,” pp. 49–50; John Passmore, “The Idea of a History of Philosophy,” 16. 5. Insight, 210–31; 243, 492–93, 482, 499–504; Method, 64–69; Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965–1980, chap. 20. 6. On horizon, see n. 6, chap. 1, above. On the “conglomerate world,” see Frederick E. Crowe, “Dogma versus the Selfâ•‚Correcting Process of Learning,” 30. Lonergan considers Crowe’s point “highly illuminating.” “Bernard Lonergan Responds,” 223. In Method, 77, Lonergan speaks of the structural unified core of one’s world as surrounded by a “penumbra of things we know about but have never examined or explored.” 7. See n. 17, chap. 1, above. 8. In chapter four below we consider one other important field in the history of thought, namely, the history of consciousness, concerned with the developmental tendency of the human mind. As far as the terminological problem goes, we have been talking in a loose fashion about the “history of thought.” With the exception of the “history of philosophy” there is no solidly established, universally agreed upon, universal vocabulary. The usage of “cultural history,” “intellectual history,” and “history of ideas,” no doubt, has been in part inspired by elementary epistemological confusion. And worse yet, no terms seem quite adequate. The “history of thought” emphasizes the product of thinking and not the process. The “history of thinking” ignores knowledge, which takes one beyond mere thinking. The “history of knowledge” again places a premium on the end product, and not the process of inquiry. The “history of know-


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ing” seems too restrictive because questions are as significant as answers. The “history of questioning” will not suffice either: answers are significant too. The “history of understanding” neglects the process of questioning and the terminus of knowledge. The “history of ideas” focuses on the content of understanding, downplaying the context, the process, and the goal. “Intellectual history” is, in its root sense, simply the history of understanding (intelligere = to understand), and it also conjures up the image of “intellectuals,” or the intelligentsia, which, in its most pejorative connotation, can mean a modern class of alienated socially useless sophists. The “history of consciousness” is too narrow, referring to the disposition and differentiation of conscious operations. The “history of culture” does not distinguish between the cultural infrastructure and the cultural superstructure. “Psychohistory” has unmistakable reductionist overtones. The “history of philosophy” does not usually include all the lovers of wisdom, the philosophers in the existential sense, some of whom labor in the humanities and of the sciences. Given the nuances and complexities of the human mind—a point registered over and over again by Lonergan—perhaps no terms will ever provide the exactitude we might desire. The best that we can hope to do, for present purposes, is to adopt certain conventions that seem to approximate the most established practice and are open to the least amount of misinterpretation. So we have nominated the “history of thought” to designate the sum total of fields connected to the interior side of cultural life. 9. Barzun, Clio and the Doctors, 17–18, 148. “Their efforts are evidently to dispose of history and civilization, of human error and achievements, rather than to contemplate them. Unwittingly, motive becomes purpose; the desire to understand is undone by the rival desire to quell uncertainty through reductive ideas.” Ibid., 84. 10. On Lonergan’s treatment of the sensitive psyche and its bias, see Insight, 210–231; on the sensitive psyche as an “upwardly directed dynamism seeking fuller realization” (which includes Jung’s notion of archetypal symbols and the symbolism of the “mystery” of the known unknown correlative to the sweep of inquiry), see ibid., 482, 569– 72; on psychic development, see ibid., 481–83, 492–93; on the dynamics of the psyche as participating in the tension of limitation and transcendence at the heart of historical existence, see ibid.,498–503; on dread in relation to the psyche, see Phenomenology and Logic, 204–6, 284–89; McPartland, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, chap. 8. There is an intersubjective dimension to the scotosis of the sensitive psyche. René Girard, for example, in Violence and the Sacred has argued for the role of mimesis in distorting desire and imagers, creating a false sense of autonomy. For applications to Lonergan’s notion of the sensitive psyche and the transcendental imperatives, see Robert Doran, “Preserving Lonergan’s Understanding of Thomist Metaphysics: A Proposal and an Example,” 94–100. 11. The relation, for instance, of Michelangelo’s sexual feelings to his work must be considered within the context of his neo-Platonism. See Howard Hibbard, Michelangelo, pp. 229–31, 233–35; Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber. 12. It is interesting to compare modern psychotherapy with the communal therapy of a primitive African tribe discussed by Rollo May in Love and Will, 331–33. May cites the example of a man who was cured of impotence by participating in a frenzied village dance dressed and acting as his mother. 13. See Eric Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic; Origins and History of

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Consciousness. For a reworking of Jung into Lonergan’s framework, see Robert Doran, Subject and Psyche: Ricoeur, Jung, and the Search for Foundations. See also n. 5, above, for Lonergan’s notion of the teleological dimension of the psyche, including Jung’s archetypes and Freud’s wish fulfullment (Insight, 482). Lonergan, in Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965–1980, 261–63, and Method, 68, commends Paul Ricoeur’s effort, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, to retrieve an implicit teleology in Freud. 14. Peter Berger, “Towards a Sociological Understanding of Psycho-analysis,” Social Research 32 (1965): 39. 15. Insight, 243. René Girard has emphasized how mimesis and its distortion of desire and images can foster a scapegoat mechanism that can pervade political society and religion. See Eugene Webb, Philosophers of Consciousness: Polanyi, Lonergan, Voegelin, Ricoeur, Girard, Kierkegaard, chap. 5; Worldview and Mind: Religious Thought and Psychological Development, chap. 5. 16. See ibid., 262, where Lonergan refers to Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony; Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium. 17. Method, 101–7; Insight, 482, 569–72, 711, 744–45; Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965–1980, chap. 20; Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. 18. Insight, 208. 19. See n. 1 above. 20. Method, 128. 21. See Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v. “cultus.” For the ancient Greek interpretation of culture, see Jaeger, Paideia. 22. On the last point, see Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, 4 vols. 23. J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture; Plato, Laws, 644D–645C, 659D–660A. 24. Insight, 208; Topics in Education, 211–221, where Lonergan is influenced by Suzanne Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from ‘Philosophy in a New Key.’ See Gadamer’s perceptive discussion of the question of truth and the experience of art in Gadamer, Truth and Method, 5–150. Gadamer attacks the notion of art that derives from the framework of the confrontation theory of truth. 25. See, for example, Henry Frankfort et al., Before Philosophy: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East, originally published as The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man; Mircea Eliade in Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, 3, speaks of studying an “archaic ontology.” 26. Van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty, chap. 1. Compare with Langer, Feeling and Form, chap. 12. Lonergan in Method, 98, refers to Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, chaps. 12–13. 27. See J. J. Pollitt, Art and Experience in Classical Greece, chap. 5; Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism; Crane Brinton, A History of Western Morals. Lonergan briefly discusses the impact of the cultural superstructure on the infrastructure in Method, 97–99. 28. See Joseph Fitzpatrick, “Lonergan and Poetry”; Topics in Education, 211–17. 29. On Merleau-Ponty, Topics in Education, 225; on the statue, Collection, 243. 30. Topics in Education, 226–27. The “world,” for Heidegger, is not present-at-hand in space; but spatiality is a feature of entities within-the-world. Heidegger, Being and


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Time, 134–48. For an application of Heidegger’s ideas to architecture, see Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Concept of Dwelling: On the Way to Figurative Architecture. 31. Topics in Education, 226. 32. See Langer, Feeling and Form, 102: . . . In highly ideal creations sculpture and architecture often have to supplement each other, and in the most perfect cultures, where mental reaches were far beyond actual human grasps, they have always done so to wit, in Egypt, Greece, mediaeval Europe, China and Japan, the great religious periods in India, and in Polynesia at the height of its artistic life. Modern sculpture returns to independent existence as the concept of social environment falls emotionally into confusion, becomes sociological and problematic, and ‘life’ is really understood—only from within the individual.

33. Topics in Education, 223–25; Hugo A. Meynell, The Nature of Aesthetic Value, chap.4. 34. Topics in Education, p. 227–28; Meynell, The Nature of Aesthetic Value, chap. 5; Method, p. 177. 35. See van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty, pp. 297–98, 300–3. 36. Topics in Education, 229; see Meynell, The Nature of Aesthetic Value, chap. 3. 37. Topics in Education, 229–31. 38. Ibid., pp. 226, 231–324. 39. Method, 105 ff., 111–12, 284. Lonergan’s thought parallels that of Mircea Eliade in Patterns in Comparative Religion, p. xiii. The object of religious meaning is not an object defined by sociology or psychology; it is the transcendental objective of the intentionality of basic horizon. See Eliade’s monumental A History of Religious Ideas, vol. 1, From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries; vol. 2, From Gautama Buddha to the Triumph of Christianity; vol. 3, From Muhammad to the Age of Reforms. 40. Method, 271–81. 41. Ibid., chap. 10. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 79, 161–62, 181–82, 221; Second Collection, 56, 233. 44. Method, 128. On at least one occasion (a reference to Aquinas’ idea of grace) LonÂ� ergan mentions the “history of ideas.” Ibid., 165–66. 45. Philip P. Wiener, ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas. For a sense of the range of materials in the genre, see a collection of articles by notable contributors over the years to the Journal of the History of Ideas in Donald R. Kelley, ed., The History of Ideas: Canon and Variations. In chap. 16, Kelley summarizes the current state of the discipline, including the impact of the hermeneutical approach. Note some terminological ambiguity, when he speaks of “the current condition of the history of ideas (more broadly intellectual history, of the history of thought). . . .” Ibid., 146. 46. Insight, 667. 47. Method, 255; Verbum, 12–24. 48. Second Collection, 70–71, 74; Insight, 28. 49. See the remarks of Mandelbaum, “History of Ideas,” 37. 50. See John Dunn, “The Identity of the History of Ideas,” 85–104; Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” 15–22. 51. Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 50.

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52. Ibid., pp. 28–30. 53. Skinner has been taken to task for projecting on the stage of the history of ideas an English academic and political propensity to handle issues piecemeal. See Bhiku Parekh and R. N. Berki, “The History of Political Ideas: A Critique of Q. Skinner’s Methodology,” 175–77. 54. On heuristic concepts and the “nature of,” see Insight, 60–61, 759; see Lonergan’s frequent references in Method, 90, 97–98, 173, 260, 304, to Snell, The Discovery of the Mind. And can we not presume to include among the possible contexts those of literary and mythic understanding, on the level of the cultural infrastructure, which cannot simply be replaced by more intellectually differentiated species of inquiry? While these literary and mythic contexts are not rooted in abstractly formulated heuristic concepts, they are nonetheless grounded in compactly expressed heuristic insights. 55. Insight, 759. 56. Ibid. 57. See Lonergan’s reference to the “inner light” of questioning. Third Collection, 193. This seems to resemble Aristotle’s “active nous,” or agent intellect, which has the potential to make all things (ta panta poiein) and Aquinas’s “intellectual light.” Aristotle, De Anima, 3.5.430a14–15; Verbum, 87–99. 58. Lonergan has related how he came to conceive of Plato’s Ideas as “what the scientist seeks to discover.” Second Collection, 264. In a fragment of a lost essay on “Assent” by Lonergan in the early 1930’s, he sees Plato’s eidos, following the interpretation of John Alexander Stewart, not as a reified concept (related to the doctrine of universalia a parte rei) but as a correlate to the activity of understanding. The document, p. 13 from the lost essay on “Assent,” is reproduced in Mark D. Morelli, At the Threshold of the Halfway House: A Study of Bernard Lonergan’s Encounter with John Alexander Stewart, xviii. 59. On truth as relative to context, see Second Collection, 207–8; on Lonergan’s notion of context, see Method, 313. 60. Method, 312–14. Lonergan’s distinction of a “prior context” can be used to justify the study of undifferentiated interpretations of an “x” (e.g., primitive ideas about the mind) prior to the insights that discover “x” as a distinct reality and establish a heuristic structure for its investigation. See Insight, p. 759. 61. Mandelbaum has criticized Arthur Lovejoy for not sufficiently differentiating the logical from the historical interconnections among ideas. Mandelbaum, “History of Ideas,” 38–40. For Lovejoy, see notes 63, 64 below. 62. See Method, 314. 63. See Collingwood, The Idea of History; Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being; D. W. Hamlyn, Sensation and Perception: A History of the Philosophy of Perception; Hannah Arendt, “What is Authority?” in Between Past and Present: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, chap. 3. 64. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas; Great Chain of Being, chap. 1. 65. Method, 79, 161–62, 181–82, 221; Second Collection, 56, 233. 66. John C. Greene, “Objectives and Methods in Intellectual History,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 59. 67. Method, 227. For discussion of ideal-types, see subsection “Historical Theories” in chap. 2 above.


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68. See, for example, Eric Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 3, Plato and Aristotle; John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke; Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx; Judith N. Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory. 69. For a wealth of bibliographical information on recent historical studies of modern philosophers, see James Collins, Interpreting Modern Philosophy, pts. 2–3. Compare Collins’s “working hypothesis” on the components of historical investigation—namely, “sources,” “historical questions,” “the interpreting present,” and “the teleology of historical understanding”—with Lonergan’s differentiation of the functional specialties of “research,” “interpretation,” “history,” “dialectics,” “foundations,”” doctrines,”” systematics,” and “communications.” Ibid., 24–34, 406–17; Method, pt. 2. Collins’s “working hypothesis” on components of historical investigation can apply to intellectual history as well as to the history of philosophy. 70. The original genius, finding “all current usage inept for his purposes,” must mold “the culture which is the background and vehicle” of the expression of his positions. Verbum, p. 37. Thus both the innovative genius and the synthetic genius must have creative insight. See Lonergan’s remarks on Aquinas’ genius in bringing together in one comprehensive framework Augustine’s “phenomenology of the subject” and Aristotle’s “psychology of the soul.” Ibid., 3–4, 9. Lonergan presents perhaps a classic description of the synthetic genius of the stamp of an Aquinas: “There is a disinterestedness and an objectivity that comes only from aiming excessively high and far, that leaves one free to take each issue on its merits, to proceed by intrinsic analysis instead of piling up a debater’s arguments, to seek no greater achievement than the inspiration of the moment warrants, to await with serenity for the coherence of truth itself to bring to light the underlying harmony of the manifold whose parts successively engage one’s attention. Spontaneously such thought moves towards synthesis, not so much by any single master stroke as by an unnumbered succession of the adaptations that spring continuously from intellectual vitality. Inevitably such a thinker founds a school, for what he builds is built securely, and what the span of mortal life or the limitations of his era force him to leave undone, that none the less already stands potentially within the framework of his thinking and the suggestiveness of his approach. Finally, the greater such a genius is, perhaps the more varied will be the schools that appeal to him; for it is not to be taken for granted that the ever lesser followers of genius will be capable of ascending more than halfway up the mountain of his achievements or even, at times, of recognizing that one mountain has many sides.” Bernard Lonergan, Grace and Freedom Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, 144. 71. Insight, 444. 72. See, for example, Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, and Richard H. Popkin, History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes. For discussion of the “fromâ•‚to” perspective in historiography, see Collins, Interpreting Modern Philosophy, 212–31. Collins rightly insists that the significance of a great thinker cannot be exhausted by such an explanatory framework and that “fromâ•‚to” frameworks are openâ•‚ended and provisional. As the horizons of intellectual historians change, the context within which they analyze trends in intellectual history will change. See Method, 192, 216. 73. Lonergan’s analogy of history to a battle, the course and outcome of which the participants are not aware, is useful in considering this matter. Method, 179, 199.

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74. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930; Gerhard Masur, Prophets of Yesterday: Studies in European Culture, 1890–1914; Baumer, Modern European Thought, 367–400. 75. Third Collection, 102; William James, Pragmatism, 198. 76. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2. Although Kuhn mentions methods, his discussion seems more weighted toward the objective pole of theories. He seems to identify methods with techniques, and he fails to stress the role of insight, all suggesting a somewhat truncated interpretation of the subjective pole. For analysis and criticism of Kuhn, see Hugo A. Meynell, Redirecting Philosophy: Reflections on the Nature of Knowledge from Plato to Lonergan, 119–29. For Lonergan’s interpretation of scientific revolutions, see Phenomenology and Logic 199–200. Lonergan cites the examples of non-Euclidean geometry, calculus, Galileo, Einstein, Quantum Mechanics, Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud. Ibid., 199. 77. Patrick A. Heelan, “The Logic of Framework Transpositions,” 96–107. On convergence upon truth, see Insight, 328. Perhaps the most radical revolution in the history of science was the transition from the basically descriptive concepts of Aristotelian physics to the explanatory concepts of modern physics around the time of Galileo, a revolution which, in Lonergan’s language, articulated the heuristic concepts that established scientific method itself. 78. Insight, 445, 655; on Toynbee’s dominant minority, Third Collection, 10, 214. The work of Marxists and such deconstructionists as Michel Foucault can be helpful in showing how intellectual culture can mask power in the form of ideology. But if this kind of analysis goes so far as to claim that intellectual culture is nothing but an expression of power, then it, as analysis, gets implicated in a performative contradiction and a self-referential problem. For criticism of Foucault, see Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, chaps. 9–10; Meynell, Redirecting Philosophy, chap. 10. 79. Phenomenology and Logic, 199–200. 80. See Lonergan’s statements of the relation of philosophy to scholarship, science, and theology in Method, 247–49; Second Collection, 166–67, 204–5. Modern scientific philosophy had metaphysical presuppositions even while it attacked metaphysics. See E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. 81. A point stressed in Pitirim Sorokin’s vast Social and Cultural Dynamics, 4 vols. 82. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 75–76. 83. All other philosophical claims have correlations, explicitly or implicitly in epistemology and cognitional theory. For example, materialists will tend to be empiricists, and idealists will tend to be rationalists. The correlation is decisive because the epistemology and cognitional theory can be verified in cognitional fact, i.e., the data of consciousness: “In other words, just as every statement in theoretical science can be shown to imply statements regarding sensible fact, so every statement in philosophy and metaphysics can be shown to imply statements regarding cognitional fact.” Insight, 5. Thus Lonergan establishes a basic philosophical semantics rooted in self-knowledge. 84. It is for this reason that Ernst Cassirer, with his neo-Kantian flare for spotting epistemological problems, is particularly incisive as an intellectual historian. See Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnesproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der Neuren Zeit, 3 vols.; The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Italy; The Myth of the State; Philosophy


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of the Enlightenment; The Platonic Renaissance in England; The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel; The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau; Rousseau, Kant, and Goethe. Cassirer was a member of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism and was most notable for extending the transcendental method beyond the sciences. It is not surprising that the early Lonergan came indirectly under the influence of the Marburg school with its emphasis on epistemology and transcendental method. He accepted John Alexander Stewart’s interpretation of Plato as a methodologist, and Stewart was adopting the approach of Marburg school member Paul Natorp. See Morelli, At the Threshold of the Half-Way House, xv–xxiii, 194–201; Second Collection, 264–65; Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965–1980, 213, 388; Caring about Meaning: Patterns in the Life of Bernard Lonergan, 22, 42, 48. Nor it is surprising that William Matthews can discern the considerable influence of Cassirer on Insight, particularly on things, development, consciousness, and symbol, even as Lonergan’s “positions” were directed against Cassirer’s Kantian “counterpositions.” See Matthews, Lonergan’s Quest, 212, 224, 228, 230–31, 239, 260–61, 265, 294, 298, 347, 350, 377–82, 401–4, 409. On a more grandiose scale Sorokin in Social and Cultural Dynamics has devised ideal-types of cultures dominated by distinct epistemological horizons, influencing thought in all fields of philosophy, in ethics, in attitudes, in art, architecture, and literature. The types are Sensate (empiricism), Idealist (rationalism as a broad category), and Ideational (religious intuitionism). Sorokin applies his analysis to the oscillating cultural phases of Western civilization as well to those of other civilizations. For Lonergan’s favorable references to Sorokin, see Bernard Lonergan, “Philosophy of History,” 63–64; Understanding and Being, 221; Topics in Education, 42, 179. 85. Lovejoy, “The Historiography of Ideas,” in Essays in the History of Ideas, 8. 86. The concern for truth as the prime characteristic of the history of philosophy has been emphasized by Leonard Nelson, “What is the History of Philosophy?” 31. 87. Insight, 411, 413; Method, 19. 88. A point stressed, if over stressed, by John Herman Randall, Career of Philosophy, 1.7. 89. Insight, 412. On the explanatory approach, which grasps ongoing contexts, even beyond the original horizon of the philosophers, see ibid., 610; Method, 165–66. This view has also been argued by Passmore, “Idea of a History of Philosophy,” 29. 90. W. von Leyden, “Philosophy and its History,” 199. Collins, Interpreting Modern Philosophy, 390–405, speaks in terms of “the intent to do historical justice.” 91. W. H. Walsh, “Hegel on the History of Philosophy,” 78; see also Passmore, “Idea of a History of Philosophy,” 15. 92. Insight, p. 411. 93. Ibid., 412. We take the connotation of the passage to mean not only that philosophers are brilliant but also that they are characteristically brilliant precisely as they follow the norms of the desire to know. 94. Ibid., 412–13. On the different horizons of the historians of philosophy, see Method, 253. 95. Insight, 413–14. 96. Ibid., 412, 414. 97. Ibid., 414. 98. Ibid., 436.

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99. Ibid., 626. 100. Method, 252. 101. On a contemporary application of Aristotle’s notion of praxis (“conduct”), see Third Collection, 184.

Chapter 4 History of Consciousness Quotation from Lonergan, Grace and Freedom, 144. 1. Collection, chap. 16. 2. Method, 128. 3. Topics in Education, 231–32. 4. Voegelin, Order and History, 4.46; Collection, 19–23. 5. Method, 228–29. 6. W. H. Walsh, “Hegel on the History of Philosophy,” 78. 7. “Philosophy of History,” 63–66. 8. Lonergan, Topics in Education, 16, 43, 51–54, 66; “Philosophy of History,” 64–65; Method; 228; Third Collection, 10, 103, 214; Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (rev. abr. ed.). Toynbee’s descriptive categories can hamper explanatory analysis and can be coupled with an excessive moralizing. See the criticism of Toynbee on this score by Franz Borkenau, End and Beginning: On the Generations of Cultures and the Origins of the West, 47–63. 9. Voegelin, Order and History, 2.89; “Toynbee’s History as a Search for Truth.” 10. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics. The crisis of our age, he maintains, is the crisis of a transition away from an inadequate, narrow “sensate” culture, which focuses exclusively on the level of experience as the road to truth. Pitirim Sorokin, The Crisis of our Age, 105. 11. Topics in Education, 42, 179; “Philosophy of History,” 63–64; Understanding and Being, 221. In the case of Western Civilization, Sorokin, The Crisis of our Age, 104, sees “sensate” culture as dominating the outlook of the ancient Minoan-Mycenaean world, the Hellenistic-Roman period, and the modern phase from the sixteenth century onward; “ideational” culture was prevalent in archaic Greece and the European Middle Ages until the thirteenth century; “idealistic” culture was paramount in Greece of the fifth century B.C. and the medieval thirteenth century. Thus there are two cycles of the series (sensate-ideational-idealistic) until the modern phase, which appears to be starting a third cycle: 1. Sensate (Minoan-Mycenaean) Ideational (archaic Greece) Idealistic (fifth-century Greece) 2. Sensate (Hellenistic-Roman) Ideational (A.D. fourth century to thirteenth century) Idealistic (thirteenth century) 3. Sensate (sixteenth century to present)

But ought the sensate type be considered the beginning or the end of a cultural cycle?


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12. Understanding and Being, 221; Topics in Education, 42. The rough correspondence between Sorokin’s cultural types of “sensate,” “idealistic,” and “ideational” and KierÂ� kegaard’s spheres of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious seems clear enough. And the correlation between the “senasate” type and Lonergan’s level of experience seems obvious. But the association of the “idealistic” type with the level of understanding seems less plausible. Sorokin uses “idealistic” in a less than philosophically technical sense, including under its rubric, for example, Thomas Aquinas, a critical realist. Sorokin seems to equate “idealistic” with the levels of both understanding and judging since he identifies it with the creative operations of understanding and the normative procedures of reason. And is the “ideational” type to be linked with the level of judging, as Lonergan suggests? Or rather with the fourth, existential level of consciousness (if not also the engulfing state of being in love)? Lonergan, it should be noted, commented on Sorokin prior to, or while in the process of finally developing, his notion of the distinct fourth level of consciousness. Sorokin’s positing of the “idealistic” type as a kind of synthesis of the “sensate” and “ideational” types, we can urge, seems to refer to the dialectical interplay between cognitive and existential levels, where reason is sublated by moral and religious concerns and where reason interprets the performance of living in truth. The ”idealistic” type seems to involve the differentiation and flowering of what Lonergan calls the cultural superstructure. 13. Although praising Toynbee’s A Study of History as “one of the most significant works of our time in the field of historical synthesis” and applauding the author for his “astounding erudition,“ Sorokin levels severe criticism against Toynbee on two main grounds: first, Toynbee’s “unit of civilization” is a mere coexistence of systems and congeries, united by mere contiguity in space and continuity in time and not by causal or meaningful bonds; and, second, Toynbee’s categories of genesis, growth, and decline of these amorphous units lack conceptual clarity. Pitirim Sorokin, “Toynbee’s Philosophy of History,” 95, 107, 110, 112–13. In A Study of History, 12.288, Toynbee’s reply to Sorokin is that he sees the ties between different relational strands of a civilization as “meaningful” but not “‘causal.” because “human relations take the form of free response to challenges.” While Toynbee’s notion of “challenge and response” can be enormously enriched by Lonergan’s cognitional theory with its principles of progress and decline, Toynbee’s notion, according to historian Carol Quigley, suffers from too close an analogy with Darwinian biology and the “struggle for existence” that makes it difficult for Toynbee to explain why a society responds or fails to respond. Carol Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis, 130–31, 416, 418. Quigley offers seven phases in the evolution (from birth to decay) of a civilization: mixture, gestation, expansion, conflict, universal empire, decay, invasion (146). In the latter, declining phases the civilization loses its basic ideology in the Age of Conflict and abandons it in the Age of Decay (347). 14. Sorokin, “Toynbee’s Philosophy of History,” 125. 15. Lonergan. Philosophy of History,” 65–66; Third Collection, 221; McPartland, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, chap. 11 16. On the Question, see Voegelin, Order and History, 4.388–89, 399–400; as the true constituent of humanity, ibid., 4.376; for the full range of human experience being present, ibid., 1.99, 4.406; for leaps in being, ibid., 2.Introduction; for insights into the structure of the Question, ibid., 4.388–404. This is not to say that the experience is identical,

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that experience is the identity in history, for the range of experience may be constant; but the quality of the experience would seem to be an historical variable, bound up with the quality of the drama of existence, and bound up most particularly with the differentiating experiences and insights regarding the structure of the Question. Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966–1985, chap. 5. 17. Roth, “History and Sociology in the Work of Max Weber,” 306–18. 18. Method, 285–86; Insight, 600–601. 19. Method, 81–99, 172–73, 257–62, 284–87, 302–12, 314–18. 20. Ibid., 284–85, 293. 21. For an extensive texual analysis, see Klein, “Dimensions of Culture in the Thought of Bernard Lonergan,” chap. 5; for a briefer investigation, see Joseph Flanagan, “The Basic Patterns of Human Understanding According to Bernard Lonergan,” chap. 7; for a more interpretive presentation, see Matthew Lamb, History, Method, and Theology: A Dialectical Comparison of Wilhelm Dilthey’s Critique of Historical Reason and Bernard Lonergan’s Meta-Methodology, 271–281. 22. Method, 84. 23. Ibid., 57–58; Manfred Frings, Max Scheler, 56–57. Scheler distinguishes community of feeling, fellow feeling, psychic contagion, and emotional identification. 24. Thus depth psychologists can find archaic myths permeated with “psychological material,” as in the illuminating study of Eric Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, vol. 1. 25. Van der leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty, 12–13; Jacquetta Hawkes, “The Achievements of Paleolithic Man,” 33; Method, 273, 275–76. 26. Method, 86–87, citing Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 1.12–15, 186ff. According to van der Leeuw, “in the dance, man discovers the rhythm of the motion that surrounds him, just as it surrounds another man or an animal or a star.” Van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty, 14. 27. Method, 276. The sacred and the secular will be “implicit rather than explicit, acted out but not named, shown rather than said, vécu but not thématique.” Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980, 272. As Eliade declares in Cosmos and History, 27–28, “ . . . We might say that the archaic world knows nothing of ‘profane’ activities: every act which has a definite meaning—hunting, fishing, agriculture, games, conflicts, sexuality—in some way participates in the sacred.” See also Method, 108, 257, 273, 276, 306. 28. Method, 273, citing Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. 29. Method, 89–90, citing Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 1. On the pratical achievements of early civilizations, see also Method, 258–59; on the practicality of pre-civilized societies, see Collection, 236–37; Method, 89, citing Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion, 17ff. 30. Method, 11, citing Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind; see Paul Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher. 31. Method, 93, 273. 32. John Wilson, “Egypt,” in Henri Frankfort et al., Before Philosophy: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East, 71–72. See Voegelin, Order and History, 1.39–41; Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as an Integration of Society and Nature; John Wilson, The Culture of Ancient Egypt; Clark,


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Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt. 33. Voegelin, Order and History, 1.41. 34. On compact expression of meaning and common sense language, see Method, 81, 85, 87, 257, 272, 276. 35. Method, 87, citing Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 1.199ff. 36. On the limits of early language, see ibid., 87 (with repect to the generic, citing J. Russo and B. Simon, “Homeric Psychology and the Oral Epic Tradition,” 484, and citing Ernest Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 1.199ff.); Method, 88 (with repect ot the temporal, citing Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 1.215ff.); Method, 88 (with respect to subjectivity—possessive rather than personal prounouns, mental processes personified, citing Russo and Simon, “Homeric Psychology and the Oral Epic Tradition,” 487, moral defect as defilement, referring to Paul Ricouer, The Symbolism of Evil); Method, 88, 108 (with repect to the divine). For the exceptions to the ideal type of “early language.” see Radin’s criticism of Cassirer in Primitive Man as Philosopher, xxiiff. 37. Method, 276, 306. 38. Voegelin, Order and History, 1.99, 123–24; van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty, 32–34. 39. On myth in various stages of meaning, see Method, 258, 275; on a culture containing both differentiated and undifferentiated consciousness, ibid., 85; on undifferentiated consciousness in various stages of meaning, ibid., 303–305. 40. Insight, 560–67 (where Lonergan uses “myth” in a pejorative sense as deformed symbolism, a usage he later dropped); Collection, 237; Method, 89. 41. See Barden, “The Intention of Truth in Mythic Consciousness,” 9, 13, 21–22. 42. Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 4., chap. 1, has detected a compact form of historical speculation, which he terms “historiogenesis,” on the imperial level of early civilizations that parallels theogonies, cosmogonies, and anthropogonies. On projection, Method, 88 n. 4; on naïve realism, ibid., 108; Klein, “Dimensions of Culture in the Though of Bernard Lonergan,” 321. 43. Method, 93; Insight, 565. 44. Method, 89 and 92–93, citing Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 2.36, 40 ff., and Levy-Bruhl’s theory of the “law of participation”; Insight, 561, 565–66. 45. On the criterion of objectivity, Insight, 561. Similarly, the constitutive function of meaning intrudes into the field of the cognitive function as the imagination constitutes the world. Method, 89. Lonergan seems to suggest that the exploratory function of myth can be usurped by pseudo-explanation. On the restricted horizon, Insight, 565; on deformed myth and magic, Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965–1980, 269. Scapegoating, according to Girard’s Violence and the Sacred is not only a conspicuious illustration of the aberrations of uncritical culture and religion but also a primal mechanism of aberration, rooted in the distortion of desire and images by the psycho-social dynamics of mimensis. See Webb, Philosophers of Consciousness, chap. 5; Worldview and Mind, chap. 5. 46. Insight, 563; see Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity. 47. Insight, 565–66. 48. Ibid., 572. Voegelin associates the magic he discerns in Hegel’s philosophy with the neoÂ�-Platonism of the fifteenth century. Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966–1985, 296–98.

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See also Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition; Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structures of Alchemy. On political “myths,” see Cassirer, The Myth of the State, chap. 18. Cassier’s conception of myth, however, retains nineteenth-century positivist features. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. 49. Method, 99. 50. Insight, 565–66, 569–72. 51. Plato, Statesman, 272A–D; Laws, 678–79. 52. Collection, 258; Method, 82. 53. Barden, “Intention of Truth in Mythic Consciousness,” 16; Method, 92. 54. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, 1–60; Lewis Mumford, The Transformations of Man, 57–80; John B. Cobb. Jr., The Structure of Christian Existence, 52–59, a short but illuminating treatment of the history of consciousness written from a Whiteheadean framework; Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion; Voegelin, Order and History, 1.48–49; 2.Introduction, esp. 86–90. Voegelin ibid., 4.49–51, has qualified the validity of Jaspers’s notion of an Axial Period by arguing that there are important lines of meaning in history which do not run along lines of time. For instance, neither Western nor Far Eastern thinkers in the first millennium B.C. were aware of each other’s existence, and neither the epiphany of Christ nor that of Mohammed fits within the time-framework of Jaspers’s “axial period.” Lonergan refers to Jaspers’s idea of the “axial period” (Collection, 237), but he maintains that the modern shift to interiority can also be considered as an ”axial period” (Second Collection, 226–27). 55. Lonergan takes “Western” history as his model in discussing horizon shifts in the history of consciousness (Method, 85). “Western civilization,” arguably, can refer to the distinct civilization born of the soil of Western Europe after the collapse of ancient Rome. Here by the “West” Lonergan means the later Western civilization and the earlier civilization of classical Greco-Roman antiquity. An extension of Lonergan’s analysis to non-Western history would have to note the following four points: 1) Eastern philosophy did not attain the same degree of theoretical breakthrough as did Greek philosophy. See Lonergan’s remarks in Insight, 756–57. 2) Eastern religions and Islam are differentiations of consciousness (Method, 109). Such religious differentiations, we would argue, play a greater role in the history of consciousness than Lonergan tends to acknowledge in his model. 3) Only in the West has there originated a movement to critically differentiated consciousness, the Age of Interiority. Although Eastern thought has focused on subjectivity, it has not done so in the context of critical philosophy, empirical science, and a notion of historicity. 4) Lonergan’s ideal of historicity— emphasizing openness to transcendence and human-divine encounter as constituting history—would seem to be fully in accord with Voegelin’s contention that there are lines of meaning in history that do not run along lines of time. In other words, axial developments in Western history nevertheless do not form an axis of history definitively revealing the essence of history. 56. Method, 92, 261. One might also consider as preconditions of the Age of Theory the technological advances of the Urban Revolution and the destruction of Bronze Age civilizations about 1200 BC, which ushered in a ”time of troubles,” challenging the validity, or efficacy, of the myth that tied order in human society to cosmic-divine order. See Voegelin, Order and History, 1.44. We develop this theme in sec. 5 below. “It was


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on the rising tide of linguistic feedback that logic and philosophy and early science emerged.” Method. 97. 57. Method, 90, citing Snell, Discovery of the Mind, chaps. 1, 3, 5, 9. Van der Leeuw in Sacred and Profane Beauty, 129, suggests that the characteristic form of Greek expression was prose, which broke up the original unity of poetry, song, and dance. He also sees a differentiation of aesthetic consciousness in the secularization of drama and of sculpture away from a purely religious art (91, 170). For a perceptive treament of the origin of Greek philosophical terms in the literary and cultiural tradition, see Richard Onians, Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate. 58. Method, 90–92, citing Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. 1, chap. 6. See Werner Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, chap. 6; Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 2, chap. 8. See also Method, 258. 59. See McPartland, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, 150–59; Voegelin, Modernity without Restraint (The New Science of Politics), 106, 141ff.; Order and History, vol. 2, chaps. 8–9; vol. 3; vol. 4, 243–52, 281–302; Lonergan, Third Collection, 189–92, 219–21. On the religious roots of theoros, see Gadamer, Truth and Method, 111; Jaeger, Paideia, 2.235–60; John Navone The Jesus Story: Our Life as Story in Christ, 103–9; and H. Koller, “Theoros und Theoria.” On the religious roots of nous (reason), see Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966–1985, 326, chap. 10; Douglass Frame, The Myth of Return in Early Greek Epic. 60. Lonergan, Grace and Freedom; Method, 278–79, 308–10; Tracy, The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan, 33–39. 61. Third Collection, 71, chap. 5, 13. 62. Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 1, 62; vol.4, chap. 6–7, citing Peter Weber-Schaefer, Oikumene und Imperium: Studien zur Ziviltheologie des chinesischen Kaiserreichs. 63. Method, 95, 258 64. On Solon, Cornelius Loew, Myth, Sacred History and Philosophy: The Pre-Christian Religious Heritage of the West, 208; Jaeger, Paideia, 1.142. According to Jaeger (143), Solon’s poems are conscious reminiscences of the Homeric theodicy in the Odyssey, 1.32ff., where Zeus asserts that men should not blame the gods for their own folly. Plato developed the ideas of his ancestor, Solon, in the Republic, bk 8, and the Statesman, 274; he implicitly compares himself with Solon in the Timaeus, 21C–D. The lyric poets began the exploration of the soul (psyche). Parmenides articulated the nous, while Heraclitus spoke of the logos. The Sophists shifted intellectual emphasis from the study of the cosmos to problems about the human world. It was the Sophist, Protagoras, who proclaimed, “Man is the measure of all things.” Fr. 1. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle focused on true human self-actualization through a well-ordered soul as the highest excellence (arête). Aristotle referred to this mature person as the spoudaios. Snell, Discovery of the Mind; Jaeger, Paideia, vols. 2–3; Voegelin, Order and History, vols., 2–3; W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists; F. M. Cornford, Before and After Socrates. 65. Second Collection, 226. Jaeger in Paideia, 2.357, argues that Plato created the early European idea of the free human personality. The Orestes Trilogy of Aeschylus perhaps represented a new awareness of of the human personality in terms of both intellectual and psychological development. On the psychological level, Ortestes attained a differentiation of his own ego against the forces that would prevent his individualtion. Neuman, Origins and History of Consciousness, 1.186–89.

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66. Plato, Statesman 269–74; Laws bk. 3 and 713C–714B; Voegelin, Order and History, 3.205–12; 4.281–91. Plato, Republic bk. 8. and 571–580. Plato acted as a physician not only to diagnose the source of disorder in Hellas, as Thucydides had done, but also to find the source of order, and hence to offer a cure. Charmides, 156D–157D. 67. Collection 239; Method, 97. 68. On the Greek view of the cosmos, see Insight 151–52. On the Greek sense of transience, Collection 239; Collingwood, The Idea of History, 21–25. Eric Havelock, The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics, argues that the Sophists propounded a theory of history as progress. On the other hand, Ludwig Edelstein, The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity insists that Plato and Aristotle were the ”progressivists.” Both works are weakened by a failure to penetrate sufficiently to the theoretical issues in the philosophy of history. Witness Havelock’s statement that “the issue as it affects a basic philosophy of human history and morals is whether we at present are living in a regress or progress” (405). 69. Lonergan’s whole project in Insight, of course, takes off from Aristotle’s passage on insight in De Anima, 3.7 (Insight, title page). For a forceful analysis of the role of wonderment in Aristotle’s logic, see Patrick H. Byrne, Analysis and Science in Aristotle. 70. Method, 95–96, 279–80, 310–11; Verbum, 4–5, 27; Insight, 431–32; Collection, 238–39; Second Collection, 72–73, 139–40, 201, 235–36; Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1048a25ff. 71. Verbum, 4–5; Method, 96; Aristotle, De Anima, , 412b4ff , 415a14–20. 72. Collection, 238–39; Second Collection, 139–140, 201; Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 71b10–12, 71b25, 72a37ff, 88b30ff; Nicomachean Ethics, 1140a24ff. 73. Method, 280, 310; Insight, 151–52. 74. Philosophy of God and Theology; Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965–1980, 422–25; Lonergan’s retrieval of Aquinas in Verbum and Grace and Freedom also massively establishes this point. 75. Method, 280, 297, 311; Philosophy of God and Theology, 30–31. 76. Method, 275. As in the Hellenistic period so in the Renaissance a skeptical humanism, reacting against the dogmatism of the philosophical schools, tended toward cultural precedence over a more philosophical humanism. See sec. 5 below. 77. Ibid., 98, 276–77, 304; Klein, “Dimensions of Culture,” 411–12. 78. Philanthropia “was an ideal that inspired education and fostered the gracious urbanity, the ease and affability, the charm and taste exhibited in Menander’s comedies and their Latin counterparts in Plautus and Terence.” Method, 97–98. 79. Second Collection, 101, 112, 182; Method, ix. 80. Collection, 241. 81. Second Collection, 112, 182; Method, 272. The distinction should be made between those people who operate solely within the cultural infrastructure, that is, those with completely undifferentiated consciousness, and those people who operate within both the cultural superstructure and the cultural infrastructure (no one operates entirely within the superstructure). Hence there is an antagonism between those with undifferentiated consciousness and those with differentiated consciousness, and for those with differentiated consciousness there is a tension between their rationality and their psychic vitality. To be sure, the degree of differentiated consciousness—the number of patterns of experience differentiated—will vary from person to person and from historical age to historical age.


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82. Friedrich Heer, The Intellectual History of Europe, xi. Lonergan’s analysis of scotosis (treated in chap. 7 of Insight) would seem to be applicable here. 83. Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic. It is interesting to examine how numerous have been the segments of the lower middle class and lower class, particularly unemployed artisans, marginal workers, and landless peasants, as potentially revolutionary classes in European history going back to the Middle Ages. See Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium. These have been groups (except for the peasants) neither sufficiently withdrawn from classicist culture (as the peasants often were) to avoid repression nor sufficiently integrated to be restrained by classicist conventions. Perhaps revolutionary movements since the Middle Ages can be viewed in one sense as representations of the “unconscious” of the cultural superstructure. 84. Method, 317. 85. Collection, 238–39; Second Collection, 103–4, 139–40; Tracy, The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan, 84–91. 86. On the shift to method, Method, 94, 310; on the communal dimension of modern science, Second Collection, 140; on the impact on non-Euclidian geometry, Quantum Mechanics, and Keynesian economics, Method, 280, 315. 87. Ibid., 209–10, 310, 315; Second Collection, 183, 194–95. Lonergan cites Gadamer, Truth and Method, 153–92; Palmer, Hermeneutics, 81, 97; Gooch, History and Historians, 28–32; Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge, 217–325. 88. Method, 315; Second Collection, 183–84; Collection, 243. 89. Second Collection, 104–10; Method, 317. 90. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, 97; J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, 202; Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, xiv; Method, 84, 258, 274. The post-medieval differentiations were on the heel of the dissolution of the medieval Western synthesis. This synthesis, to generalize, following the “discovery of the mind” in the Age of Theory, made the mind the integrating principle. The mind was not a mirror of nature, but nature was a mirror of mind. Mind was the key to the dynamics of human nature. The well-ordered mind was the source of order in human society. God was pure mind. Nature was an intelligible, pre-established static hierarchy within which human nature flourished in its proper place within the hierarchy of human society. This worldview, of course, underwent numerous variations and criticisms. But if we accept the penetrating analysis of Louis Dupré, as early as the fourteenth century we witness its fragmentation in the via moderna. Neither the self-assertion of modernity, argued by Hans Blumberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, nor the second wave of modernity, the Enlightenment, nor the post-modern era has fundamentally changed the intellectual situation. According to Dupré, “Modernity is an event that has transformed the relation between the cosmos, its transcendent source, and its human interpreter. To explain this as an outcome of historical precedents is to ignore its most significant quality—namely, its success in rendering all rival views of the real obsolete.” Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture, 249. The result has been what Charles Taylor has called the “secular age.” Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. For the problematic status of the notion of “transcendence” in the modern age, its interpretations throughout the history of consciousness, and its contemporary retrieval, see Glenn Hughes, Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity. The differentiations Lonergan talks about have, arguably,

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been added on to the dissolution, but they also provide the challenge for the solution —the “discovery of the self.” 91. Third Collection, 63; Frederick Lawrence, “’The Modern Philososophical Differentiation of Consciousness’ or What is Enlightenment?” 92. Second Collection, 93, 115. 93. Insight, 8, 257–58, 260, 262, 445, 552, 557–58, 572; Method, 98–99; Second Collection, 115, 186. 94. Insight, 552, 710; Method, 365; Third Collection, 65. 95. “The large establishment and its bureaucratic administration, then, suffer from four defects. The establishment’s products and services are specified by universals, but the good is always more concrete than a set of universals. Its mode of operation is rigid with little tolerance for discretionary adaptation. Its capacity for more alert observation and more critical reflection that generate revised ideas and remodeled operations seems no greater than those attributed to the scientific community by Thomas Kuhn. Its size, finally, its complexity, and its solidarity with other large establishments and bureaucracies provide a broad field for the ingenuity of egoists, the biases of groups, the disastrous oversights of ‘practical’ common sense.” Third Collection, 63. See Insight, 259–60. 96. Method, 261. 97. On Descartes, Insight, 4, 433–36, 551–53; on modern dualism, Insight, 411, 438– 40; Method, 96, 263–64; on Kant, Method, 96; Insight, 438–39; Collection, 192–97, 218; Giovanni B. Sala, Kant and Lonergan: Five Essays on Human Knowledge; on Hegel, Insight, 365, 396–98, 446–48, 553; Method, 96, 264; Understanding and Being, 12–14, 297–98; Tracy, The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan, 91–96; on Husserl, Method, 96, 264. 98. Method, 83. 99. Ibid., 96, 264, 316. For a narrative, informed by Voegelin’s philosophy of consciousness, of the philosophical entry into interiority, see Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. 100. We can suggest that the Age of Myth centered on the image, the Age of Theory on the concept, and the Age of Interiority on insight, which is precisely the pivot between image and concept. 101. Collection, 245. 102. Insight, 266. 103. Third Collection, 102–4, 108. 104. Toynbee, A Study of History: Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics; Borkenau, End and Beginning. 105. Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations, 416. Remarkably, in Quigley’s analysis, Western civilization had heretofore avoided the latter stages of decline. After the period of gestation, Western civilization has undergone three cycles of expansion and conflict from 1050 to 1950 (see the chart on 389). What is the source of this “exceptionalism”? The cause seems to lodge in two main factors: first, an intellectual moderation opposed to the extremes of both otherworldlyism and materialism, exemplified by the victory of the “moderate realism” of Aquinas that embraced universal and particular, God and


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world, and, second, a commitment to the ongoing, collaborative search for truth, also exemplified in the medieval idea of “fruitful debate out of which truth grows” (341) and supported by the religious ideas of the “unfolding of doctrine through the church” and of the individual’s development toward the Beatific Vision (342). Quigley and Borkenau both see Western civilization as the precarious negotiation of a number of tensions. 106. Robert Doran, “The Theologian’s Psyche: Notes toward a Reconstruction of Depth Psychology”; Subject and Psyche; Theology and the Dialectics of History, chap. 2, 6–11, 20. On the deformation of myth, Insight, 560–72; Method, 89. On Auden, Eugene Webb, The Dark Dove: The Sacred and the Secular in Modern Literature, chap. 8. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or; Concluding Unscientific Postscript. For a synthesis of Lonergan’s method and theories of psycholgical development to define nature religious consciosness, see Webb, Worldview and Mind. 107. Jaeger, Paideia, 3.46. 108. Verbum, 6–9; Method, 261, 177–78; Second Collection, 212, 245–59; The Way to Nicea. 109. On Plato’s dialogues, Verbum, 4. On Augustine, Method, 277–78, 307–08; Second Collection, 22–23, 212, 245–59. On Arisotle and Aquinas, Verbum, 5–6. 110. Verbum, 5–6, 9–10; Insight, 432–33. 111. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 68, 74, 246–47, 319–21 112. Voegelin, Order and History, 4.113–17, 327–33, 403 113. See McPartland, Lonergan and the Philosophey of Historical Existence, 94–106; Webb, Philosphers of Conscionsess. 114. There cannot be proper appreciation of the significance of modern historical consciousness, for example, without understanding, by way of comparison and contrast, the classical notion of history. The classical scholar cannot adequately appraise the classical notion of history without being familiar with problems in the philosophy of history. And neither the modern nor the classical notions of history can be satisfactorily penetrated without viewing them in comparison with, and contrast to, mythic consciousness. 115. Mazlish, The Riddle of History; Manuel, Shapes of Philosophical History; White, Metahistory. 116. Löwith, Meaning in History; Voegelin, Order and History, 4.47–51.

Conclusion 1. Collection, 244; see McPartland, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, chap. 4. 2. Insight, 8. 3. See McPartland, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, 82–94. 4. Frederick E. Crowe, The Lonergan Enterprise. 5. Insight, 600. 6. Ibid., 7.

Bibliography

The entire corpus of Lonergan and an extensive collection of Lonergan commentators are available at the Lonergan Research Center, Regis College, University of Toronto. There are numerous branch Lonergan Research Centers worldwide, including that of Boston College.

Works by Lonergan Lonergan, Bernard J. F. “Analytic Concept of History.” Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 11 (1993): 5–35 ———. “Bernard Lonergan Responds.” In Foundations of Theology: Papers from the International Lonergan Congress, 1970, edited by Philip McShane. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971. ———. Caring about Meaning: Patterns in the Life of Bernard Lonergan. Edited by Pierrot Lambert, Charlotte Tansey, and Cathleen Going. Montreal: Thomas More Institute, 1982. ———. Collection: Papers. Vol. 4 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. Edited by F. E. Crowe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. ———. Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. Vol. 1 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. Edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. ———. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. Vol. 3 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. Edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. ———. Method in Theology. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972. ———. Phenomenology and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism. Vol. 18 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. Edited by Philip J. McShane. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. 189

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———. Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965–1980. Vol. 17 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. Edited by Robert C. Croken and Robert M. Doran. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. ———. Philosophy of God and Theology. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1973. ———. “Philosophy of History.” Chap. 3 in Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1958–1964. Vol. 6 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. Edited by Robert C. Croken, Frederick E. Crowe, and Robert M. Doran. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. ———. A Second Collection. Edited by William F. J. Ryan and Bernard J. Tyrell. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1974. ———. A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan. Edited by Frederick E. Crowe. New York: Paulist Press, 1985. ———. Topics in Education: The Cincinnati Lectures of 1959 on the Philosophy of Education. Vol. 10 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. Edited by Robert M. Doran and Frederick E. Crowe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. ———. Understanding and Being: The Halifax Lectures on Insight. 2nd ed. Vol. 5 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. Edited by Elizabeth A. Morelli, Mark D. Morelli, Frederick E. Crowe, Robert M. Doran. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. ———. Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas. Vol. 2 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. Edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. ———. The Way to Nicea: The Dialectical Development of Trinitarian Theology. Translated by Conn O’Donovan. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976.

Works About or Influenced By Lonergan Barden, Garrett. “The Intention of Truth in Mythic Consciousness.” In Language, Truth, and Meaning: Papers from the International Lonergan Congress, 1970. Edited by Philip McShane. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1972. Beards, Andrew. Method in Metaphysics: Lonergan and the Future of Analytic Philosophy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008 ———. Objectivity and Historical Understanding. Avebury Series in Philosophy. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 1997. Byrne, Patrick H. Analysis and Science in Aristotle. SUNY Series in Ancient Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Coelho, Ivo. Hermeneutics and Method : The “Universal Viewpoint” in Bernard Lonergan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

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Crowe, Frederick E. “Dogma versus the Selfâ•‚Correcting Process of Learning.” In Foundations of Theology: Papers from the International Lonergan Congress, 1970. Edited by Philip McShane. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971. ———. The Lonergan Enterprise. Lanham, MD: Cowley Publications, 1980. Doran, Robert. “Preserving Lonergan’s Understanding of Thomist Metaphysics: A Proposal and an Example.” In Lonergan Workshop, vol. 21. Edited by Fred Lawrence, 85–101. Boston: Boston College, 2009. ———. Subject and Psyche: Ricoeur, Jung, and the Search for Foundations. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1979. ———. “The Theologian’s Psyche: Notes toward a Reconstruction of Depth Psychology.” In Lonergan Workshop, vol. 1. Edited by Fred Lawrence, 93–137. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1978. ———. Theology and the Dialectics of History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Fitzpatrick, Joseph. “Lonergan and Poetry.” New Blackfriars 59 (1978): 441– 50, 517–26. ———. Philosophical Encounters: Lonergan and the Analytic Tradition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Flanagan, Joseph. “The Basic Patterns of Human Understanding According to Bernard Lonergan.” PhD diss., Boston College, 1967. Heelan, Patrick. “The Logic of Framework Transpositions.” In Language, Truth, and Meaning: Papers from the International Lonergan Congress, 1970. Edited Philip McShane. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1972. Hughes, Glenn. Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Jacobs-Vandegeer, Christian. “Insight into the Better Argument: Consciousness, Communication and Criticizability in Habermas and Lonergan.” Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 23, no. 2 (2005): 45–74. Klein, Dennis D. “Dimensions of Culture in the Thought of Bernard Lonergan.” PhD diss., Boston College, 1975. Lamb, Matthew. History, Method, and Theology: A Dialectical Comparison of Wilhelm Dilthey’s Critique of Historical Reason and Bernard Lonergan’s Meta-Methodology. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1978. Lawrence, Frederick. “The Fragility of Consciousness: Lonergan and the Postmodern Concern for the Other.” Theological Studies 54 (1993): 55– 94. ———. “Gadamer and Lonergan: A Dialectical Comparison.” International Philosophical Quarterly 20 (1980): 25–47.

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———. “‘The Modern Philosophical Differentiation of Consciousness’ or What is the Enlightenment?” In Lonergan Workshop, vol 2. Edited by Fred Lawrence, 231–79. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981. ———. “Self-Knowledge in History in Gadamer and Lonergan.” In Language Truth, and Meaning: Papers from the International Lonergan Congress, 1970. Edited by Philip McShane. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1972. Matthews, William. Lonergan’s Quest: A Study of Desire in the Authoring of Insight. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. McCarthy, Michael. The Crisis of Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. McPartland, Thomas J. Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Meynell, Hugo. Redirecting Philosophy: Reflections on the Nature of Knowledge from Plato to Lonergan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Morelli, Mark D. At the Threshold of the Halfway House: A Study of Bernard Lonergan’s Encounter with John Alexander Stewart. Chestnut Hill, MA: The Lonergan Institute of Boston College, 2007. Navone, John. The Jesus Story: Our Life as Story in Christ. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1978. Pannenberg, Wolfhart. “History and Meaning in Bernard Lonergan’s Approach to Theological Method.” In Looking at Lonergan’s Method. Edited by Patrick Corcoran, 88–100. Dublin: Talbot Press, 1975. Plants, Nicholas. “Lonergan and Taylor: A Critical Integration.” Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 19, no. 1 (2001), 143–72. Piscitelli, Emil J. “Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Religious Symbol: A Critique and Dialectical Transposition.” Ultimate Reality and Meaning 3 (1980): 275–313. Roy, Louis. Mystical Consciousness: Western Perspectives and Dialogue with Japanese Thinkers. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Sala, Giovanni B. Kant and Lonergan: Five Essays on Human Knowledge. Translated by Joseph Spoerl. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Zanardi, William Joseph. “Transcendental Method and the Crisis of Historicism.” PhD diss., Loyola University of Chicago, 1975.

Other Works Appleby, Joyce, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob. Telling the Truth about History. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1994. Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Viking Press, 1968.

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———. “Toynbee’s History as a Search for Truth.” Chap. 7 in Published Essays, 1953–1965. Vol. 11 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Edited by Ellis Sandoz. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000. von Leyden, W. ”Philosophy and its History.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 54 (1954): 187–208. Von Ranke, Leopold. Histories of the Latin and Germanic Nations from 1494– 1514. Excerpt in The Varieties of History from Voltaire to the Present. Edited by Fritz Stern. New York: World Publishing Co., Meridian Books, 1956. Wagar, W. Warren. World Views: A Study in Comparative History. Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden Press, 1977. Walsh, David. The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Walsh, W. H. “Hegel on the History of Philosophy.” History and Theory. 4 Beiheft 5 (1965): 67–82. ———. Philosophy of History. New York: Harper and Row, 1960. Webb, Eugene. The Dark Dove: The Sacred and the Secular in Modern Literature. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975. ———. Eric Voegelin, Philosopher of History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981. ———. Philosophers of Consciousness: Polanyi, Lonergan, Voegelin, Ricoeur, Girard, Kierkegaard. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988. ———. Worldview and Mind: Religious Thought and Psychological Development. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. Weber-Schäfer, Peter. Oikumene und Imperium: Studien zur Ziviltheologie des chinesischen Kaiserreichs. Munich, 1968. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. New York: Mentor Books, 1947. Wiener, Philip E., ed. Dictionary of the History of Ideas. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968. Wilkins, B. T. Carl Becker. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961. Winter, Gibson. Elements for a Social Ethic: Scientific Perspectives on Social Process. New York: Macmillan Co., 1966. Wilson, John. The Culture of Ancient Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951. Yates, Frances A. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1964.

Index

Academic praxis, 35, 47, 110 Academy, 148 Acculturation, 11, 20, 27, 34, 60 Aeschylus, 183n65 Aesthetic consciousness, 86 Agent intellect, 174n57 Agricultural: Age, 147; Revolution, 150 Alchemy, 126 Analytic philosophy, 2, 93, 153 Anamnesis, 128 Anaximander, 131 Anaximenes, 131 Anselm, Saint, 130 Anthropocentric view, 138 Antihistorical immobilism, 134–35 Apocalypse, 124 Aquinas, Thomas, 3, 8, 49–50, 87, 89, 98–99, 134, 148, 154, 161n3, 174n57, 175n70, 179n12, 184n74, 186n105 Archeologists, 152 Architecture, 88, 90 Areté, 183n64 Aristotle, 20, 49, 95, 99, 129, 131, 133–34, 148, 150, 174n57, 175n70, 183n64, 184n68–69: and scientific ideal in Posterior Analytics, 133–34 Art, 84–85, 121, 123, 155 Astrology, 126 Auden, W. H., 147 Augustine, Saint, 83, 141, 148, 175n70 Authenticity, 15, 21, 112, 142–43: and objectivity, 24, 26 Averroes, 130 Avicenna, 130

Axial Period of History, 59, 128, 157n4, 182n54: Second, 136 Barnes, Elmer, 36 Barzun, Jacques, 39, 81, 168n94 Basic horizon. See Horizon:—basic Beards, Andrew, 169n117 Becker, Carl, 37, 45, 70–71, 164n32 Behaviorism, 139–40 Berger, Peter, 84 Bergson, Henri, 28, 88–89, 128, 143 Berkeley, George, 142 Berlin, Sir Isaiah, 69 Bias, 30, 61, 67, 82, 91, 102, 107, 154, 156, 169n115 Bible, 116 Biography, 82–83, 97, 99 Blondel, Maurice, 143 Blumberg, Hans, 185n90 Boeck, August, 137 Borkenau, Franz, 145–46, 178n8, 187n105 Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne, 2, 144 Bourgeoisie, 98 Bronze Age, 150, 182n56 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 37, 115 Buddhism, 129 Bultmann, Rudolf, 165n57 Burckhardt, Jacob, 64, 66, 72, 168n98 Butterfield, Herbert, 69 Byzantine civilization, 130 Cambridge Platonists, 142 Cassirer, Ernst, 67, 176–77n84, 182n48 Challenge and response, 116, 179n13

205

206

Index

Chateaubriand, François René Auguste, Vicomte de, 37 Chinese: civilization, 130; philosophy, 149 Christ, 182n54 Christianity, 129, 140 Chronology, 36. See also Historical criticism, external Classicist (culture) mentality, 134–35, 137–38, 140, 143, 145, 148, 184n81 Classics, 50, 106, 135 Civilization, 121–22 Cobb, John, 128 Cognitional: structure, 116; theory, 150, 176n83 Collingwood, R. G., 40, 45–46, 67, 138, 164n32, 165n54 Collins, James, 175n69,72 Common sense, 17, 56, 59, 66, 69–70, 123, 135, 140, 142, 159n245 Communications. See Functional specialties Community, 11, 60, 120 Comte, Auguste, 2, 37, 77 Concept(s), 92–95, 133, 186n100. See also Heuristic: concepts, ideas, and structures Conceptualist, 153, 156 Confrontation theory of truth, 3, 4, 9, 19, 45–46, 49, 134, 153–54: as extroverted “already-out-there-now-real,” 9 Confucian sage, 130 Conscience, 14 Consciousness: undifferentiated, 120–128, 184n81 —differentiated, 128–45, 147, 182n55, 184n81: religious, 129–30. See Interiority, Age of; Theory, Age of Consubstantiality, 123 Context, prior, 174n60 Conversion, 21, 50, 160n25 Copernicus, Nicholas, 138 Cosmocentric view, 138 Cosmogony, 124 Cosmopolis, 64, 71, 87, 167n90 Coulanges, Fustel de, 58 Counterpositions, 15, 67–68, 72, 77, 80, 102–103, 107–110, 134, 141, 156, 161n3 Counter-Reformation, 135

Creative minority, 99–101, 112, 144–46 Critical: exigency, 142; realism, 115, 159n17. See Philosophy: critical Croce, Benedetto, 72 Crowe, Frederick, 156 Cubism, 88 Cultural: infrastructure, 16, 79, 85–87, 109, 128, 144, 172n27, 174n54, 184n81; monism, 77–78; pluralism, 77–78, 138; superstructure, 16, 35, 47–48, 75, 79, 85–87, 92, 102, 109, 113, 126, 154, 169n111, 172n27, 179n12, 184n81, 185n83 —history, 31–32, 80, 85–91, 109, 113, 152, 156, 170n8: and aesthetic forms of fine arts and poetry, 86–90; and religion, 90–91; as distinguished from history of ideas, 91–92, 96–97; as focused on cultural infrastructure, 85–87; as related to history of consciousness, 86–87; as related to intellectual history, 103 Culture, 76–77, 85, 170n1: as normative, 135, 138; classicist, 85; defined, 85 Dance history, 16, 121 Dante (Alighieri), 87 Dark Ages, 145–46 Dasein, 8 Decline, 15, 24, 28–30, 41, 61–62, 65–67, 84, 109, 116, 132, 143, 145–46, 154 Derrida, Jacques, 9 Descartes, René, 8, 99, 107–109, 141–42 Description, 126 Desire to know, 23–24, 28, 61, 63, 77, 95, 98, 101–102, 112, 116, 152, 154, 177n93 Destiny, 60, 89, 112 Developmental theory. See History of Consciousness—developmental theory Dialectic: defined, 60; of history, 15–16; of basic and relative horizon, 26–28, 35, 143; of immanence and transcendence, 127; of performance and interpretation, 15, 26, 29, 34, 35, 40, 47, 110, 113, 154–55; of position and counterposition, 15, 102, 107–110, 134, 156; of progress and decline, 15, 61–62, 116, 132, 143, 154; of self and

Index tradition, 20, 59–60, 62, 99; of subject and society, 20, 59–60, 62, 154 Dialectical analysis, 65, 67–74, 104, 107– 109, 168n105, 169n117: as invitation to philosophy, 73; distinguished from evaluative history, 68–69; criticizes itself, 69; stages of 67–69 Dialectics. See Functional specialties Dicere, 3 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 4, 23, 27, 34, 62 Diplomatic. See Historical Criticism Discovery: of the mind, 129, 136, 185n90; of the self (subject), 136, 142, 150 Divertissements, 67, 146 Doctrines. See Functional specialties Dogmatism, 134, 143 Dominant minority, 102 Doran, Robert, 147 Doxa, 133 Drama, 90, 155: of history, 54, 61, 63, 66, 130, 144 Dread, 67, 82, 84 Droysen, Johann Gustav, 37, 45, 55–56, 137 Dunn, John, 93 Dupré, Louis, 185n90 Duree puré, 89 Eddington, Sir Arthur, 139 Edelstein, Ludwig, 184n68 Education, 11, 20, 27, 34, 60 Effective-historical consciousness, 47 Egyptian culture (ancient), 42–43, 123, 127 Einstein, Albert, 3 Élan vital, 147, 155 Elements, 48 Eliot, T.S., 97 Emergent probability, 18, 134 Empiricist(s), 12, 40, 45, 78, 153–54, 176n83 Enlightenment, 69, 97, 139–40, 147, 150: and methodological control of objects, 3; Second, 141, 143 Epic of Gilgamesh, 129 Epigraphy. See Historical: criticism Episteme, 133 Epistemological assumptions, 103 “Epistemological turn,” 8

207

Epistemology, 131, 141, 176n83–84, 177n84 Euclid, 48 Existentialism, 2, 87, 104, 154 Explanation, 126 Expressionism, 88 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 37, 108, 142 Finality, 28, 114 Foucault, Michel, 157n4, 176n78 Foundational: not foundationalism, 1, 3; notion as operative and dynamic, 8; performance, 4; thinkers, 1 Foundations. See Functional specialties Frankfort, Henri, 123 Freedom, 17, 61, 131 French Revolution, 98, 139 Freud, Sigmund, 2 Friedländer, Paul, 168n100 Frye, Northrop, 64 Functional specialties, 30–31, 35–36, 39, 47–48, 73, 155, 162n10: and historicity, 35–36, 75–76, 113: and James Collin’s “working hypothesis” of historical investigation, 175n69; communications, 31, 35, 149; dialectics, 30, 35, 38–39, 43, 47, 49–50, 53, 65–75, 91, 102, 104, 107, 109, 113, 161n3, 162n10, 163n24, 164n39, 168n100, 168n105; doctrines, 30, 35, 43, 91–92, 161n3, 163n24, 168n102; execution of policy, 31; foundations, 30, 35, 161n3, 163n24; interpretation, 30, 35–36, 38–43, 47–54, 65, 71–72, 74– 75, 109, 113, 161n3, 163n24, 168n100, 168n105; history, 30, 35–36, 38–39, 43, 47, 54–65, 74–75, 109, 113, 161n3, 163n24, 168n100, 168n105; research, 30, 35, 43, 53, 65, 71–72, 75, 161n3, 163n24, 168n105; social planning, 31, 35, 76; social policy, 30–31, 35, 76, 113, 168n102; systematics, 31,35, 50, 53, 161n3, 163n24, 168n102 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 24, 47–49, 150, 164n39, 165n54, 172n24 Galileo, Galilei, 139, 142 Gay, Peter, 69, 168n94

208

Index

German Historical School, 137 Girard, René, 171n10, 172n15, 181n45 Gnosticism, 127, 131 Goethe, von, Johann Wolfgang, 116 Golden Age, 128 Gothic cathedral, 87 Great Man theory of history (genius), 58–59, 99–100, 175n70 Greek: culture, 178n11; Enlightenment, 150 Green, John, 97 Habermas, Jürgen, 33, 159n17 Havelock, Eric, 184n68 Hawkes, Jacquetta, 121 Hebrew culture, 124–25, 131 Hecataeus, 129 Hedonism, 146 Heelan, Patrick, 102 Heer, Friedrich, 136 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1, 6, 28, 33, 37, 72, 77,108, 113, 115, 142, 156, 164n38, 181n48 Heidegger, Martin, 2, 3, 8, 9, 14, 35, 88 Hellenistic period, 127, 178n11 Heraclitus, 48, 87, 129, 131, 183n64 Hermeneutical circle, 52, 111 Hermeneutics, 2, 38–43, 47–54, 137, 165n43: and intention of author, 51–53; evaluative, 65–66, 71 “upper and lower blades” of, 40, 118–20, 156, 163n16. See also Functional Specialties; Universal viewpoint Herodotus, 17, 129 Hesiod, 125, 129 Heuristic: anticipation of totality of correct interpretations, 38–39, 41; concepts, ideas, and structures, 94–96, 156; structure of scientific method, 110 Hierarchy of lastingness, 123 Hierophanies, 124 Hinduism, 129–30 Historia, 17 Historical: criticism (external), 36, 39, (internal), 36; data, 45; description, 55–56, 62–65, 70–73, 152, 168n92; destiny, 60; experience, 44; evaluation, 24–25, 29–31, 61–62, 64, 65–74, 91, 97,

104, 106, 155–56; explanation 55–65, 70–73, 152, 168n92, 168n94; facts, 45; judgment, 44, 46–47; method, 153, 164n28; novels, 63–64; (collective) responsibility, 140, 153; scholarship (modern), 137–38, 142, 145, 154–55; understanding as extension of common sense, 56, 59, 66, 69–70. See also Objectivity: historical —narrative, 44, 62–65, 68, 74, 104, 152, 155, 168n92, 168n94: styles (Comic, Romantic, Satirical, Tragic), 64 —theories, 56–62: and universal patterns, 57; as ideal-types, 57–58, 65; from history of consciousness, 58–59; from human sciences, 55–56; from ontological philosophy of history, 59–62; from speculative philosophy of history, 58–59; heuristic value of, 57 Historicism, 153. See also Relativism Historicity, 14–15, 22, 25–26, 35–36, 48, 50, 70, 89, 105–106, 125, 131–32, 134, 143, 147, 154–55, 182n55 Historiogenesis, 181n42. See Voegelin, Eric Historiography, 29–30, 36–37, 46: and field specializations in history of thought, 76, 80–81; and historicity, 29–30; as movement within history, 29, 113; methodological control of, 55–56, 63–64, 67–73; nationalist, 37; political, 36; positivist, 37; romantic, 37, 46; scientific, 36–37. See also Functional specialties; Historical: criticism, narrative; History; History of Thought; Objectivity—historical History: as drama, 54, 61, 63, 66, 112, 114, 130, 144, 154–55, 163n24; as existential (lived), 29, 35, 47, 73, 86, 89; as hermeneutical enterprise, 154–55; as inquiry, 17, 127, 152; as intelligent and intelligible, 18; as project, 35; as what is going forward, 54; Axial Period of, 59; basic, 55, 64, 74; distinguished from hermeneutics, 54; distinguished from nature, 139; general, 55, 63–65, 74, 112, 166n63–64; military analogy of, 54–55, 100, 175n73; modern

Index versus classical interpretation of, 187n114; special, 55, 62–65, 74, 97, 105, 166n63–64; that is written about, 16–17, 73; Whig interpretation of, 37. See Cultural: history; Dialectical analysis; Great Man theory of history; Historical; Historiography; History of consciousness; History of ideas; History of religion; History of thought; Intellectual history; Philosophy—history of; Philosophy— of history; Psychohistory; Theology: of history History of consciousness, 31–32, 41, 52, 54, 58, 77, 82–84, 86–87, chap. 4: combines upper blade (developmental theory) and lower blade (scholarly disciplines) of hermeneutics, 118–20. See Interiority, Age of; Myth, Age of; Theory, Age of —developmental theory: as grandscale ideal-type, 118–20; based on differentiations of consciousness (patterns of experience and realms of meaning), 119; posits two epochal differentiations (theory/ transcendence and history/ interiority), 119 History of ideas, 31–32, 79–80, 109–110, 113, 152, 156, 170n8: and difference between originating insight and concept, 92–93, 95; and historical contexts, 95–96; and heuristic concepts, ideas, and structures, 94–96; and special histories, 97; as distinguished from cultural and intellectual history, 91–92, 96–97; as evaluative, 97; as thematic, 96–97; as unified by recurrent questions, 95 History of religion, 90–91: and religious experience, 91; evaluative, 91 History of thought, 31–32, chaps 3–4, 152, 155–56, 170–71n8: and field specializations with increasing philosophical content, 76, 80–81, 109– 110, 156; and thematic continuity, 79; defined, 76–77, 170–71n8. See Cultural history; History of Ideas; Intellectual

209

history; Philosophy—history of; Psychohistory Hobbes, Thomas, 108, 142 Homer, 89, 123–24, 129, 183n64 Horizon, 10: as concrete synthesis of conscious living, 10; as conglomerate world, 79, 102; as defined by range of questions, 10; as embodied in technology, institutions, and cultural sedimentations; communal, 11, 60; relative, 5, 26–28, 35, 39, 41–43, 94–95, 125, 143. See also Zeitgeist —basic, 5, 16, 18, 21–29, 35, 43, 47, 70, 94–95, 102, 125, 131, 143, 154, 162n10, 167n90, 173n39: and progress and decline, 24, 28, 143, 154; as fusion of horizons, 24, 38, 42–43, 50, 52; as universal viewpoint, 38–43, 47; definition of, 21, 25; identity-indifference, 23–26, 28, 95, 180n16; performative criterion of, 21, 73, 154; structure (invariant, dynamic, normative) of, 27–28 Huizinga, J., 139 Human being as historical project, 22–23, 25, 27, 35 Human science, 30–31, 57–58, 92, 155 Humanism, 132, 134–35, 137, 148 Hume, David, 69, 108, 142, 169n117 Husserl, Edmund, 8, 9, 14, 142 Hylozoism, 138 Idealists, 78, 98, 119, 140, 144, 153, 176n83 Ideal type(s), 31, 57–58, 65, 98, 115, 118–19, 128, 144, 147–48, 150, 152, 156, 167n76 Ideas, 92–97. See also Heuristic: concepts, ideas, and structures Ideologies: and power, 176n78; political, 127 Immanence, 127 Impressionism, 88 Inauthenticity, 15, 70, 112, 143 Incarnate meaning, 67 Indian civilization. See Hinduism; Philosophy: Indian, Indirect communication, 67, 104, 149 Industrial Revolution, 139

210

Index

Inquiry, 10–15, 21, 23, 33, 63, 127, 152: and inner (intellectual) light, 174n57; as historia, 17; as self-transcending, 11, 75, 154; norms of, 11, 24, 28, 33, 75; structure of, 11, 116–17 Insight, 158n8, 186n100: and intellectual development, 51, 101; as genesis of concepts, 92–93, 95; as selftranscending, 12; direct, 12; heuristic, 156; moral, 14, 66; philosophical, 106; reflective, 13 Intellectual history, 31–32, 67–68, 80, 86, 97–104, 109, 113, 152, 156, 170–71n8: and basic horizon, 102; and bias, 102; and creative minority, 99–101; and cultural superstructure, 97–98, 102; and “from-to” framework (Collins), 175n72; and interdisciplinary collaÂ� boration, 103–104; and resistance to new ideas, 102; applies findings of psychohistory, 102; as dialectical and evaluative, 102, 104; as distinguished from history of ideas, 91–92, 96–97; as distinguished from history of philosophy, 104–105; as explanatory, 102–104; delineates dominant assumptions and questions of the age, 97–100; delineates dominant assumptions as philosophical (epistemological); 102–104; partners with cultural history, 103. See Thinkers Intelligence, 17 Intelligentsia, 171n8 Intelligere, 3, 171n8 Intention: of the good, 23–24, 28, 61, 66, 77, 112, 154; of truth, 128 Intentionality, 9–11 Interiority, Age of, 125, 128, 136–44, 146, 148–50, 182n55, 186n100 Interpretation. See also Dialectic: of performance and interpretation; Functional specialties; Hermeneutics; Self-scrutiny; Philosophy: critical Intersubjective communication, 120, 123 Ionians, 131 Iron Age, 147 Islam, 129–30, 182n55 Isocrates, 132, 134, 148

Jaeger, Werner, 148, 160n25, 168n100, 183n64–65 James, William, 101 Jaspers, Karl, 59, 128, 182n54 Jesuits, 135 Joachite theory of history, 119 John of the Cross, 49 Judgment, 13–14, 40, 44, 47, 73, 170n2: as virtually unconditioned, 40, 158n8; criterion, 44, 52–53; historical, 44, 47 65. See also Objectivity—historical: of value judgments Jung, Carl, 84 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 8, 49, 94, 99, 142, 154, 162n3, 169n117 Kelley, Donald R., 173n45 Kepler, Johannes, 102 Keynesian economics, 137 Kierkegaard, Søren, 67, 100, 104, 116, 143, 147, 149, 179n12 Kingship, sacred, 123 Known unknown, 124, 128, 140, 143 Kuhn, Thomas, 101, 176n76 La haute vulgarization, 135 Langer, Suzanne, 88 Language, early, and problems with generic, temporal, subjective, and divine, 123–25 Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent, 95 Lawrence, Frederick, 139 Learning, self-correcting process of, 44, 51–53, 66, 75, 91. See also Insight Legend, 124 Lexicography. See Historical: criticism Liberal Anglican interpretation of history, 115 Life world (Lebenswelt), 8 Literature, 84–85, 103, 135 Locke, John, 98 Loew, Cornelius, 131 Logic, 133, 137 Logos, 183n64 Lovejoy, Arthur, 97, 105, 174n61 Löwith, Karl, 3 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Baron of Rothley, 37, 65

Index Magic, 126–27, 140–41, 146 Malebranche, Nicolas, 142 Mandelbaum, Maurice, 68, 77–78, 166n63, 167n87, 174n61 Manuel, Frank, 151 Marburg School, 177n84 Marrou, Henri-Irenee, 57–59, 166n70, 167n76 Marx, Karl, 2, 33, 37, 72, 77, 98, 115, 119 Materialism, 131, 144, 176n83 May, Rollo, 171n12 Mazlish, Bruce, 151 Meaning: expressions of, 163n20; of history, 114–15; realms of; 41, 61, 119, 122, 130; stages of, 111; religious, 173n39; theoretical control of, 132 Meinecke, Friedrich, 70 Memphite Theology, 125 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 88 Metaphysics, 131, 133, 154 Method, 137, 142 Methodological control of historical functions, 55–56, 63- 64, 67–74 Michelangelo (Buonarroti), 83 Michelet, Jules, 37, 64, 72 Middle Ages, 129–30, 134, 138–39, 142, 178n11 Mill, John Stuart, 37 Mimesis, 121, 123 Modernity, 185n90 Mohammad, 182n54 Moksha, 130 Morals, 85, 124 Mumford, Lewis, 59, 128 Music, 89, 155 Mystery, 112, 114, 127, 151: cults, 129 Mysticism, 149 Myth(s), 82–83, 114, 138–39, 143–44, 151, 155, 182n48: Age of, 120–29, 144–47, 152, 156, 186n100; and stages of meaning, 125, 187n114; defined, 124; deformed, 126–27, 140–41, 181n45 Naive realism, 125 Narrative, 124, 151. See also Historical: narrative Natorp, Paul, 177n84

211

Naturalism, 139–40 Naturalist fallacy, 139 Nazis, 69 Neolithic Revolution, 121–22, 125 Neo-Kantianism, 2, 48 Neo-Platonism, 87, 139, 149, 181n48 Neumann, Eric, 84, 136 Neurosis, 82, 84 Newman, John Henry, 141 Newton, Isaac, 87,102 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 72, 143 Nihilism, 140 Nominalism, 78, 94, 148, 153 Non-Euclidean geometry, 137 Nous, 183n64 Novels, historical. See Historical: novels Nunc, 89 Objective order of society (technology, economy, polity, culture), 11, 27, 34, 60–62 Objectivity, 24, 28, 36–54, 64, 71, 86, 143: and undifferentiated consciousness, 126; as authentic subjectivity, 24, 28; as fidelity to norms of basic horizon, 43, 67 —historical, 36–54, 65, 67, 71, 153: and self-knowledge, 40; and universal viewpoint of basic horizon, 38–43; of value judgments, 36–37, 46–47, 64–66, 73, 155–56 Ockham, William of, 134 Old Regime, 136 Ontological philosophy of history. See Philosophy—of history “Ontological turn,” 8, 9 Painting, 88 Paleography. See Historical: criticism Parables, 124 Parmenides, 129, 131, 183n64 Patres, 148 Patterns of experience, 10, 41, 53, 61–62, 119 Peloponnesian War, 67 Peirce, Charles, 159n13

212

Index

Performative criterion (of selftranscending inquiry), 11–12, 19–21: of basic horizon, 22 Peripatetics, 148 Person, 59 Perspectivism, 28–29, 39, 45, 72, 91, 160n39, 165n43 Pharaoh, 123 Phenomenology, 2, 26, 32, 34 Philanthropia, 135, 184n78 Philology, 152. See Historical Criticism Philosophy, 80, 86, 102–104, 113–14, 124–25, 154–56: and desire to know, 177n93; and methodical exigency, 142; and universal audience, 48; as functional specialty, 30–31, 73; Chinese, 149; critical, 136, 141–42, 144; Eastern, 182n55; Hellenistic, 148; Greek, 128–35, 149, 182n55; Indian, 149; perennial, 135 —history of: 31–32, 76, 80–81, 86, 104–110, 113, 152: and bias, 107; and positions and counterpositions, 107– 110, 134, 156; and reversal of decline, 109; and unity of philosophy, 109; as both scholarly and philosophical (evaluative), 106; as distinguished from intellectual history, 104–105; as explanatory, 106; as internal to philosophy, 106; historicity of, 105–106, 155; with its own internal (special) history, 105 —of history: epistemological, 6, 7, 16–17, 19, 35; epistemological and speculative grounded in ontological, 7, 19, 35, 112– 13, 115, 118; ontological, 6–33 passim, 35, 41, 59–62, 112–13, 115, 118, 154; speculative, 6, 7, 16–17, 32, 37, 58–59, chap. 4; three-stage theory of, 119 Photoelectric effect, 3 Piaget, Jean, 27 Planck, Max, 102 Plato, 21, 46, 49–50, 87, 93–94, 98–99, 104, 128–29, 131–32, 134, 139, 148–50, 160n25, 174n58, 183n64–65, 184n66, 184n68 Poetry, 89–90, 155: dramatic, 90; epic, 89–90; lyric, 90, 129, 131

Polanyi, Michael, 150 Pope, Alexander, 87 Positions, 15, 68–69, 72, 76, 80, 102, 107–110, 115, 134, 156 Positivism, 8, 37, 39, 45, 47, 88, 91, 100, 119, 139–40, 153–54, 182n48 Postmodern, 1–3, 9, 46, 153–54 Practical intelligence, 121 Pragmatists, 143, 154 Prehistory, 16 Printing press, 98 Progress, 15, 24, 29–30, 40, 61–62, 65–66, 116, 132, 143, 145, 154, 161n3, 184n68 Progressivists, 144 Prose, 183n57 Providence, 132 Prussian School, 169n113 Psyche, 78, 151, 155, 183n64 Psychohistory, 31–32, 80–85, 102, 109, 113, 152, 156: and biography, 82–83; and collective neuroses, 84; and Freudian model, 81; and history of consciousness, 82–84; and neurotic bias, 82–83; and myths and symbols, 82–83; and reductionism, 82–84; methodological problems of, 81–82 Pure question, 95 Pythagorians, 131 Quantum Mechanics, 3, 137 Questio, 130 Questioning. See Inquiry Quigley, Carroll, 145–46, 179n13, 186– 87n105 Ranke, von, Leopold, 36, 64–65, 72, 114, 168n98 Rationalist, 12, 153–54, 176n83 Realism (painting), 88 Reductionism, 82–84, 91, 124, 131 Reformation messianism, 84 Reid, Thomas, 159n24 Relativism, 14, 17, 23, 25, 28, 32, 52, 73, 101, 140–41 Relativity, special theory of, 3 Religion, 84–85, 121, 135, 182n55. See also History of religion Renaissance, 135

Index Responsibility, 17 Ressentiment, 67, 146 Revolutionary movements, 136, 184n81 Ricoeur, Paul, 53, 168n94 Rilke, Ranier Maria, 97 Ritual, 123–24 Romanticism, 88, 140, 147 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 98 Sacred, 180n27 Scapegoating, 181n45 Scholasticism, 127 Science, 85, 92, 97, 114, 124–25, 127, 136, 138, 142, 145, 154 Scientific: ideal, 133–34; Revolution, 138–39, 150; revolutions, 101–102, 176n76 Scientism, 139 Scheler, Max, 120, 1870n23 Schelling, von, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 2, 37, 139 Schlegel, Friedrich, 50 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 137 Scholasticism, 87, 97, 130, 134, 139, 148 Scotosis, 82, 155, 171n10 Scotus, Duns, 134, 153, 161–62n3 Sculpture, 88, 90 Secular, 180n27, 183n57, 185n90 Self: -appropriation, 118, 142; -scrutiny (knowledge), 1, 19–21, 32–33, 40, 50, 73, 144; -transcendence, 11–12, 154; discovery of, 136, 142, 150; lack of awareness of, 120, 125–26 Shakespeare, William, 116 Shaman, 121, 123 Shopenhauer, Arthur, 89, 143 Skepticism, 134, 148, 151, 153 Skinner, Quentin, 93–94, 174n53 Snell, Bruno, 87 Social: engineering, 140; monism, 77, 170n2; planning and policy, 30–31, 36, 113. See also Functional specialties Socialization, 11, 20, 27, 34, 60 Sociology of knowledge, 11, 26, 34, 102 Socrates, 87, 100, 111, 113, 128–29, 147, 150, 183n64 Solon, 131, 183n64 Sophists, 131, 150, 183n64, 184n66

213

Sorge, 8 Sorokin, Pitirim, 2, 116–17, 145–46, 178n10: criticism of Toynbee, 116–17, 179n13; cultural types (sensate, ideational, idealistic), 116–17, 145–46, 177n84, 178n11, 179n12 Speculative philosophy of history. See Philosophy—of history Spengler, Oswald, 2, 77 Spinoza, Baruch, 48, 142 Spoudaios, 20, 183n64 Stewart, John Alexander, 174n58, 177n84 Studium atque humanitatis, 135 Subject. See Interiority; Self Subjectivity, 24, 142–43 Summae, 130 Surrealism, 88 Symbolism, 88, 139 Symbols, 82–83, 120–21, 123, 138–39, 147, 151, 155: archetypal and anagogic, 83; defined, 124–25 Systematics. See Functional specialties Taoism, 129–30 Taylor, Charles, 9, 185n90 Technology, 127 Teleology, 28 Tension of limitation and transcendence, 75, 112. See also Dialectic Thales, 131 Theatre of the Absurd, 87 Theology, 85, 92, 113, 155: of history, 132 Theophrastus, 150 Theory, Age of, 128–136, 144, 146–49, 156, 186n100 Thinkers: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim 129; innovative, 99, 101; representative, 99–100; synthesizers, 99. See also Creative minority; Intellectual history Thomism, 134 Thucydides, 67, 184n66 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 64, 72 Totalitarian movements, 127, 140–41 Toynbee, Arnold, 102, 115–17, 145, 167n76, 178n8, 179n13 Tracy, David, 22 Tradition, 50, 96, 99, 113

214

Index

Tragedies, 90, 129 Transcendence: and immanence, 127; and mystery, 127; of question and answers, 11; question as immanent source of, 11 Transcendental: ego, 8, 9; precepts, 13–15, 35, 66 Tuchman, Barbara, 168n93 Unit-idea, 96–97, 156 Universal viewpoint, 38–43, 46–52, 58, 152, 162n10, 163n24, 168n105: as fusion of horizons, 38, 42–43; definition of, 41; genetic sequences of expression, 40–41; heuristic anticipation of totality of correct interpretations of meaning, 38–39, 41; “upper blade” of hermeneutics, 40, 58. See also Hermeneutics Urban Revolution, 121–22, 125, 150, 182n56 Values, scale (hierarchy) of, 66 Van der Leeuw, Gerardus, 16, 87, 89, 121, 180n26, 183n57 Vertical finality, 114 Vico, Giovanni Battista, 2, 18 Virtually unconditioned judgment. See Judgment: as virtually unconditioned

Voegelin, Eric, 9, 10, 18, 29, 35, 67, 69, 114, 117–18, 120, 123, 130, 150, 156, 168n100, 181n48, 182n54–55: differentiations of consciousness (noetic and pneumatic) as leaps in being, 117–18, 128; historiogenesis, 181n42; the Question as the constant in history, 117 Voltaire, de François Marie Arouet, 2 Von Leyden, W., 106 Wagner, Richard, 89 Walsh, W. H., 37, 106, 115, 169n115 Weber, Max, 57, 71, 81, 83, 118: developmental analysis of history, 57, 118; situational analysis of history, 57, 81, 118 Western civilization, 128–30, 136, 147, 186n105: and the “West,” 130, 149, 182n55 White, Hayden, 64, 72–73, 151, 169n117– 118 Whitehead, Alfred North, 3, 103 Wilson, John, 123 Wolf, Friedrich, 137 Xenophanes, 129, 131 Zeitgeist, 53, 79, 98, 100–101, 104, 155. See also Intellectual history Zoroastrianism, 129

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