Last month I published an old (1978) paper of mine on the problem (scandal?) of philosophical diversity, “Philosophic Diversity and Skeptical Possibility: A Confrontation with Hegel”[1]—why is it that brilliant minds committed to discovering truth cannot agree?—but I forgot to mention that when I wrote it, my discovery of Bernard Lonergan and his proposed outline of a solution to the problem was still a few months in the future.
The first step in cornering it, he said, lies in grasping “the polymorphism of human consciousness.” Consciousness operates differently in different contexts, for example, commonsense understanding, theoretical reasoning, artistic expression, or moral deliberation, and so forth.
In his magnum opus, Insight: A Study in Human Understanding, Lonergan makes this bold pronouncement:
. . . the polymorphism of human consciousness is the one and only key to philosophy.[2]
I learned only today of the publication, in 2008, of a (prohibitively expensive) book that elaborates upon this proposition.[3]
Summarizing a paper he intended to deliver at a conference shortly after Insight was published, Lonergan wrote (this is the summary’s text in its entirety):
In Europe at the present time, there is a widespread disaffection for St. Thomas and not a little favor for the apparently timely doctrines of personalists, phenomenologists, and existentialists. In America, while Thomism holds a secure position among Catholic philosophers, it does happen that those who, after a course in Scholastic philosophy, have gone on to other specialized fields, at times exhibit a marked hostility to the philosophy in which they had been educated.
It would seem difficult to disassociate this phenomenon with problems of personal, intellectual development. A new higher viewpoint in the natural sciences ordinarily involves no revision of the subject’s image and concept of himself, and so scientific advance easily wins universal and permanent acceptance. But a higher viewpoint in philosophy not only logically entails such a revision but also cannot be grasped with a “real apprehension” unless the revision actually becomes effective in the subject’s mental attitudes. So the philosophic schools are many, and each suffers its periods of decline and revival.
It was to foster such a “real apprehension” of one’s own intelligence and reasonableness and to bring out its intimate connection with the fundamental differences of the philosophies that the present writer labored in his recent work, Insight.[4]
The fruit of the labor Lonergan refers to is on display in Chapter XVII, “Metaphysics as Dialectic.” Here are a few sentences from its opening paragraphs:
If Descartes has imposed upon subsequent philosophers a requirement of rigorous method Hegel has obliged them not only to account for their own views but also to explain the existence of contrary convictions and opinions. Accordingly, our appeal has been not only to the isomorphism between the structure of cognitional activity and the structure of proportionate being but also to the polymorphism of human consciousness. . . . Not only is it possible to deal piecemeal with opposed opinions but also there is available a general theorem to the effect that any philosophy, whether actual or possible, will rest upon the dynamic structure of cognitional activity either as correctly conceived or as distorted by oversight and by mistaken orientations.
. . . [I]t is necessary to transpose the issue from the field of abstract deduction to the field of concrete historical process. Accordingly, instead of asking whether the views of any given philosopher follow from assumptions of a specified type, we propose to ask whether there exists a single base of operations from which any philosophy can be interpreted correctly and we propose to show that our cognitional analysis provides such a base.[5]
In an earlier chapter, XIV, The Method of Metaphysics, Lonergan had outlined the limits of deductivism (to which the natural scientist is attracted) and the need to advert to the matter of the philosopher’s personal development:
. . . [W]hile the reasonableness of each scientist is a consequence of the reasonableness of all, the philosopher’s reasonableness is grounded on a personal development and on personal knowledge. For the issues in philosophy cannot be sled by looking up a handbook, by appealing to a set of experiments performed so painstakingly by so-and-so, by referring to the masterful presentation of overwhelming evidence in some famous work. Philosophic evidence is within the philosopher himself. It is his own inability to avoid experience, to renounce intelligence in inquiry, to desert reasonableness in reflection. It is his own detached, disinterested desire to know. It is his own advertence to the polymorphism of his own consciousness. . . . It is his own grasp of the dialectical unfolding of his own desire to know in its conflict with other desires that provides the key to his own philosophic development . . . Philosophy is the flowering of the individual’s rational consciousness in its coming to know and take possession of itself.[6]
“Other desires” are possible sources of bias, which can occlude insight and interfere with arriving at the truth, and Lonergan pays a great deal of attention to bias. But as congenial as the philosopher may find Lonergan’s approach—which paints a picture of the philosopher not very different from that of one sitting by the fireplace and evaluating one’s mental innards—the question of what kind of world makes this investigation is possible is not raised. The Christian worldview alone fills the bill as I’ve argued on this site and in a book.[7]
The Jesuit Lonergan was a Christian theist; he rounded off Insight with Chapters XIX (on proving the existence of God) and XX (on man’s problem of evil in the light of that existence) before shipping the manuscript off to the publisher.[8] But he failed to acknowledge God’s revelation, His speaking to man, as the source of his investigative starting points, the ground of his very ability to ask any of his questions. He argued to the existence of the source from something else, say, his awareness of operations in his mind (and inference that they operated in the same way in the minds of others) of the allegedly “pure desire to know”—an unbiblical notion if there ever was one. The topic of the unrighteous suppression of the truth (Romans 1:18-20) was not unfamiliar to him, but he only brought it to bear after the fact. It’s as though he felt the tug of conscience to circle back to God to make sense of what he was doing.[9]
Still, highlighting the personal dimension of dialectic—philosophical, political, scientific—whose warriors are all bias-besotted flesh-and-blood sinners, is helpful (as far as it goes) in illuminating intellectual disagreement. It’s a dimension we must not neglect when we attempt to make sense of our sense-making and philosophize about it.
Notes
[1] Appended to “How I philosophized when I put philosophy before Christ,” AnthonyGFlood.com, October 21, 2024. Bill Vallicella dissected the problem in “Disagreement in Philosophy: Notes on Jiří Fuchs,” Maverick Philosopher, November 24, 2024.
[2] Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Longmans, 1957, 427. Polymorphism is the condition of having many forms: poly– (πολύ) “many” or “multiple” + morphē (μορφή) “form” or “shape.”
[3] Gerard Wamsley, Lonergan on Philosophic Pluralism: The Polymorphism of Consciousness as the Key to Philosophy, UToronto Press, 2008. Wamsley is the Vice-President of St. Augustine College, Johannesburg.
[4] Bernard Lonergan, “Philosophic Difference and Personal Development,” The New Scholasticism, 32 (1958) 97; emphasis added. He had planned to present it at the 1958 meeting of the Catholic Philosophical Association at Loyola University (New Orleans). Lonergan had completed a draft but was unable to deliver it at the conference. The title of the paper he did deliver is “Insight and the Method of Theology.”
[5] Lonergan, Insight, 530-31. “. . . philosophers living and dead are not just structures and tendencies but also less general responses to problems peculiar to particular places and times.” 530; emphasis added.
[6] Lonergan, Insight, 429; emphasis added.
[7] Anthony Flood, Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, Amazon, 2022.
[8] Before he was shipped off to Rome. (Lonergan’s choice of verb.) He worked on Insight between 1949 and 1953 while teaching at Toronto’s Jesuit Seminary. In 1952, he learned of his reassignment to the Gregorian University in Rome, effective in 1953. This prompted him to “round off” his work on the manuscript before his move. Despite his efforts, however, Insight was not published until 1957. See Lonergan’s reflections in “Insight Revisited,” in A Second Collection: Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J. Edited by William F. J. Ryan and Bernard J. Tyrrell, Westminster Press, 1974, 268. Insight would not have been the same without those last two chapters!
[9] Anthony Flood, “Bernard Lonergan’s “Insight”: on becoming an intellectually fulfilled theist,” AnthonyGFlood.com, November 15, 2018; Anthony Flood, “Bernard Lonergan had it backwards; August Hopkins Strong, about right,” AnthonyGFlood.com, December 4, 2018.