[Also on Substack. See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3]
It’s a challenge to write about dialectic without engaging in it, that is, without evaluating examples of dialectic from one’s position. It’s a challenge because dialectic presupposes experiences or documents that one has interpreted and historically contextualized, and the ability to engage in such activities varies from person to person.
In every dialectical exchange, the opponents have achieved a certain level of personal development, a level they cannot improve “on the spot.” That is, awareness of truth-inhibiting biases, like the ability to evaluate experiences or documents, is person-variable. One goal in a dialectical exchange is to bring those biases to light, to expose not only the gnat in the interlocutor’s eye, but also the camels clogging one’s own esophagus. (Matthew 23:24) Not everyone welcomes such exposure.
As the contemporary political scene reveals, dialectic, which aims at truth, often takes a back seat to polemic, an aggressive form of intellectual exchange that aims to vanquish the opponent, eliminating him from the arena. (Figuratively, of course, we charitably assume!) Polemic is not one of Lonergan’s functional specialties! It arises in the extrascientific realm of social life.[1]
Dialectic is not mere criticism. When I review a book, I’m not necessarily seeking dialogue with its author, let alone the more demanding relationship of dialectic. I might, however, in the interest of furthering the discovery of truth, hope for that outcome.
In short, one doesn’t stumble into dialectic. One consciously adopts a stance toward an exchange of ideas that’s already in play. The exchange may preexist one’s awareness that this is going on, that it’s rooted in imperfectly grasped texts with a history, also imperfectly understood.
In the previous installment of this series, I said dialectic “is a situation before it is an approach to it.” One’s awareness of dialectical strife as situation, an objective conflict to be discovered as one reads the times and the Times, pre-exists the decision to contribute to its resolution (or evade the whole business). Once the decision is made, however, the question of how to approach the objective situation arises.
In the first place, both sides need a common vocabulary; that is, they need to understand key terms in the same way. Ascertaining that they do takes time and patience. If there is resistance to adjusting the way one speaks, one must evaluate that resistance. Does it stem from a commitment to the truth of the disputed matter? Or a desire to suppress that truth? Or is the polemical impulse to vanquish one’s opponent, by forbidding him to speak freely, operating?
Immediately, the dynamic of questioning, which is neither separate from nor reducible to terminology, arises. The question-and-answer is the lifeblood of the dialectical encounter. And the questioning is not rhetorical. Polemics are brim-filled with rhetorical questions, especially of the snark-drenched variety. Dialectical questioning is information-seeking that is ordered to the attainment of insight, the act of understanding one’s experience (including the experience of reading historical documents).
Again, some insights are not wanted by one side or the other (or by both). Bias, which shuts out truth, warps dialectical progress toward it. It touches on the central matter of personal development.[2] As Lonergan encapsulated it:
. . . [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 settled 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.[3]
As Lonergan well knew, however, there is a theological issue: man’s fallenness and his propensity to suppress truth (Romans 1:19-20), to revel transgressively in the fruit of one’s biases. But that means that there’s no “pure desire to know,” the lynchpin of his theistic proof, if not of his whole enterprise.[4] “There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God” (Romans 3:11; cf. Psalms 14 and 53)
In surveying the dialectical struggles that have interested me, I will lay bare my biases to the extent that I can. Thus, the challenge mentioned at the head of this installment.
Notes
[1] See Anthony Flood, Christ, Capital and Liberty: A Polemic, 2022
[2] Anthony Flood, “Bernard Lonergan’s insight into philosophical diversity: the variable of personal development,” AnthonyGFlood.com, November 27, 2024.
[3] Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Longmans, 1957, 429; emphasis added. Polymorphism is the condition of having many forms: poly– (πολύ) “many” or “multiple” + morphē (μορφή) “form” or “shape.”
[4] Anthony Flood, “Bernard Lonergan had it backwards; Augustus Hopkins Strong, about right,” AnthonyGFlood.com, December 4, 2018.