Nonsense & Sensibility

Warning: it is possible that the following post contains a lot of tedious inside baseball that is of no interest to anyone except to me. Nevertheless, it touches on things I need to know in order to not mislead you, which I have taken a solemn oath never to do. Besides, its Friday, which means, Let’s get ready to ramble! 

Just to reset where we are in the Cosmos: we’ve been looking into Bernard Lonergan’s Insight, said to be the magnum opus of this philosophical and theological brainiac. I’ve taken a few cracks at it over the years -- beginning in 2009 -- but always gave up for perfectly understandable reasons we'll eventually get into.

Okay, I'm lazy. 

However, with the assistance of a primer by a more accessible author, I’ve been able to penetrate it and gain some insight into Insight. Which, after all, is literally the central thesis: that there is something invariant and universal in the nature of insight, whatever its object, from matter to math to myth to metaphysics and more.

On the face of it, this is an appealing notion -- to Bob, anyway, for soul-revealing reasons alluded to in yesterday’s post -- for it would mean that insight into insight is insight into everything, and Bob has an innate wish to be omniscient -- to find the transcendental area rug that pulls the entire cosmos together. We’ve looked everywhere for it and concluded that it falls upon us to weave post by post with threads of horizontality and verticality, or the personalism of spirit and impersonalism of reason. 

Ever since Aristotle, we’ve divided the world into various disciplines and subdisciplines, such that the method is determined by its object -- the object of knowledge. 

Lonergan’s approach turns this on its head and focuses on the subject of knowledge, looking for its universal structure. For this reason, it falls into the category of “transcendental Thomism,” a movement that can be traced a century back to a fellow named Désiré Mercier:

Mercier, opposing on one hand the universal methodical doubt of Descartes and on the other the naive realism of the tradition, sought a new criterion of truth to ground the objectivity and the certitude of knowledge, one moreover intrinsic to the activity of the intellect itself….

The decisive factor in this -- common to all the transcendental Thomists -- is the finality of consciousness. Analysis of the performance of the human spirit discloses at its very core an innate drive to being as absolute and really existing; this is the very nature of man as "spirit in the world" or finite transcendence. 

At the heart of this kind of thinking lies the "transcendental method": first, attention is directed not to objects to be known but to the intentional acts of subjects in their very knowing; secondly, what is sought thereby is [an analysis of] the a priori conditions for the very possibility of knowing finite objects in any objective way. 

Its starting point is the "question": man is ceaselessly driven to question everything except the very fact of his questioning. But this heuristic character of consciousness is inexplicable unless one admits some sort of a priori "awareness" of what it is that the question seeks. One cannot ask "what is it" without betraying some sort of nonobjective prehension of the range of being; being (not "for us" but "in itself") is the horizon of the question.

As you can see, this whole discussion rapidly descends into intolerable jargon. Naturally, some folks (or maybe a lot, I really don’t know) don’t like this approach, because there is nothing that is liked by everyone. At any rate, if you want to bore yourself with the ins & outs of the dueling pinheads, go at it: https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/thomism-transcendental

I was about to say that “I only know what I know,” but it’s really a matter of knowing what I like, which is to say, of temperament or sensibility. I don’t ultimately care about the (merely) rational proofs one way or the other, because there are some things that I can neither be talked into or out of. 

Call them prejudices if you like, because that is precisely what they are: pre-judgments about critically important areas of thought and reality. For example, no one could talk me into materialism, no matter how compelling the argument. It’s just not for me. 

Nor am I alone, because our pal Nicolás is always nearby; he reminds me of me, not with regard to just the content, but prior to this, the sensibility. Now that you know the term “transcendental Thomism,” note how each of these aphorisms implies it, even though I doubt he would ever have identified himself with any particular academic hatchery of eggheads (the emboldenment of relevant words is mine).

Of what is important there are no proofs, only testimonies.

I am merely the place from which I perceive -- not the object of my interest but what it is that interests me.

God is not the object of my reason, nor of my sensibility, but of my being.

The thirst for the great, the noble and the beautiful is an appetite for God that is ignored.

Things do not have feeling, but there is feeling in many things.

The scientific proposition presents an abrupt alternative: understanding it or not understanding it. The philosophical proposition, however, is susceptible to growing insight. Finally, the religious proposition is a vertical ascent that allows one to see the same landscape from different altitudes.

The meanings are the reality; their material vehicles are the appearance.

The truth is objective but not impersonal.

The universe is important if it is appearance, and insignificant if it is reality.