[Also on Substack. See Part 1, Part 2]
I was not always dispensationally conscious, or even worldview-conscious. Becoming so required me to reorient and regiment my thinking, to trade in (or up) the pretension of human autonomy in philosophy for “heteronomy,” the “hetero” ( “other”) being God as He is revealed in Scripture.
Dialectic (from διαλέγειν, dialegein; “to speak across”) is a situation before it is an approach to it.
If positions are both topically related and opposed to each other, then they imply a dialectic. The position-holders need not be aware of this. Each side is presumed to be oriented toward truth, however imperfectly, even if they sinfully suppress and distort the truth (which, of course, depends on some grasp of the truth).
What I call the “metaproblem” of dialectic is a problem insofar as ignoring this fact of life hampers the opposed sides in their efforts to resolve their disputes. That is, it’s not a first-order problem, one they set out to tackle. It’s a second-order problem that “comes with the territory” of being human this side of the Kingdom.
When you read “dialectic,” you may mutter (echoing many a medieval monk) Graecum est; non legitur—loosely, “It’s Greek to me.” Nevertheless, dialectic is a feature of our social life: I affirm X, which you doubt or deny. And you cannot doubt this feature without instantiating it.
Dialectic, the fourth of our functional specialties, deals with conflicts. The conflicts may be overt or latent. They may lie in religious sources, in the religious tradition, in the pronouncements of authorities, or in the writings of theologians. They may regard contrary orientations or research, contrary orientations of research, contrary interpretations, contrary histories, contrary styles of evaluation, contrary horizons, contrary doctrines, contrary systems, contrary policies.
Not all opposition is dialectical. There are differences that will be eliminated by uncovering fresh data. There are the differences we have named perspectival, and they merely witness to the complexity of historical reality. But beyond these are fundamental conflicts stemming from an explicit or implicit cognitional theory, an ethical stance, a religious outlook. They profoundly modify one’s mentality. They are to be overcome only through an intellectual, moral, religious conversion. The function of dialectic will be to bring such conflicts to light and to provide a technique that objectifies subjective differences and promotes conversion.[1]
To make progress in the daunting task I set before me,[2] I draw upon the work of Bernard J. F. Lonergan, SJ (1904-1984), whom I began studying (and met once at a Jesuit infirmary[3] ) more than forty years ago.[4]
For him, dialectic was one of eight “functional specialties” that every intelligent enquirer engages in more or less competently whenever he or she joins an intellectual enterprise with a past and an eye on the future.[5] They provide a collaborative, systematic framework for theology (but not only for that field of study).
Lonergan arranged them into two phases: the first four (research, interpretation, history, dialectic) deal with gathering and assessing data, while the second four (foundations, doctrines, systematics, communications) develop and apply truth, which requires a personal conversion.
There is a pattern (indeed, a cycle) that lies outside of any individual’s control. As an intellectual, you are engaged in one or more of the eight specialties, and your results in any one potentially feed into the next one.
For example, you research documents (e.g., books) for understanding, contextualize them historically, are confronted by opposed but related viewpoints that emerge from the study of history, and then decide for or against one or another horizon within that dialectic (that’s the level of existential choice or value).
No longer in dialectic, you are converted to a viewpoint or horizon that serves as a foundation (again, at the level of value) for doctrines to be related systematically and then communicated, which creates new material for research. This cycle is the real-world foothold for your method.
According to Lonergan, these eight functional specialties exemplify four levels of human consciousness in two “directions,” if you will: experience, understanding (of what is experienced), judgement (of one’s understanding), and the deployment of judgement in the service of ethical commitment. The first four functional specialties correspond to four levels of consciousness, as do the second four, but in reverse.
Lonergan related the specialties to the levels of consciousness this way:
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- Specialties 1 and 8, Research and Communications, correspond to experience, Level 1.
- Specialties 2 and 7, Interpretation and Systematics, engage our intelligence, our ability to understand or grasp patterns in experience, Level 2.
- Specialties 3 and 6, History and Doctrines, have to do with judgments, which occur on Level 3.
- Specialties 4 and 5, Dialectic and Foundations, are Level 4 activities.
Conversion is a personal event that lays the foundation for what one does after one has, more or less competently, considered the oppositions that the study of history has revealed. Conversion entails a decision to adopt one worldview (or viewpoint or “horizon”) and not another. It expresses what happens on the level of ethical responsibility. This is true of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Stalinists, Trotskyists, and as much to Roman Catholic traditionalists like Bernard Lonergan as to the Protestant Christian Individualists like his contemporary Otis Q. Sellers.
Lonergan saw dialectic as a study of conflicts arising from different intellectual, ethical, or underlying “horizons” or worldviews (frameworks of knowledge and values). In dialectic, we bring oppositions to light to promote conversion to a stable viewpoint, one we can build on, not one that collapses upon the slightest pressure.
In history, the inquirer comes to see a mix of virtue and vice, progress and decline, and different interpretations of humanity. We are forced to compare the basic orientations or worldviews according to which people think and live differently.
Dialectic is a “second-order” science that analyzes differences in human understanding and valuation. Lonergan distinguished positions (which invite development) and counterpositions (which invite reversal). The strife of logically irreconcilable views moves the contending parties beyond debate and polemic to self-transcendence or self-destruction.
To be continued.
Notes
[1] Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Method in Theology, Seabury Press, 1972, 235. A critical edition prepared by Robert M. Doran and John D. Dadosky forms Volume 14 of Lonergan’s Collected Works published by the University of Toronto Press in 2017.
[2] See Part 1, “Christian Individualism and Dialectic, Part 1: A Daunting Task Beckons,” April 14, 2026.
[3] “Bernard Lonergan’s Insight: on becoming an intellectually fulfilled theist,” November 16, 2018
[4] Previous essays of mine, besides the one cited in note 3, may provide an introduction: “Bernard Lonergan had it backwards; Augustus Hopkins Strong, about right,” December 4, 2018; “What are we doing when we’re reading? Bernard Lonergan and Gordon Clark on “black marks on white paper,” December 22, 2020; “What are we doing when we’re reading? Part 2: Gordon Clark’s occasionalism and Bernard Lonergan’s accumulation of insights converging on a viewpoint,” January 20, 2021; “Bernard Lonergan’s insight into philosophical diversity: the variable of personal development,” November 27, 2024; “How Lonergan’s Insight was received: the case of Quentin Lauer, SJ.,” November 29, 2024.
[5] I’m taking the following from Lonergan’s Method in Theology (1972), Chapter 10: Dialectic, which builds on his Insight (1957), Chapter XVII: Metaphysics as Dialectic, especially section 3, “The Truth of Interpretation.”