Shopping for the Perfect Area Rug

I just finished another book by Bernard Lonergan, this one called Method and Theology. It has a lot of bright ideas, but I can’t say I recommend it to a general audience, rather, perhaps only to trained theologians. Or to folks who pretend to be and who have all the time in the world to think about obscure matters that nobody cares about.

The thesis of the book is catnip for the the latter, since you could say it is the mirror image of the eternal quest of the Transdimensional Raccoon: as we are always in search of the theoretical area rug that pulls the entire cosmos together (vertical and horizontal, objective and subjective, celestial and terrestrial), Lonergan proposes that there is just one method for doing so, regardless of the discipline, from physics on up to theology on down. 

In other words: One Cosmos, One Rug, One Method. Or, the Meta-Mega-Mother of all Methods. Such a promise is literally irresistible to untrained theologians who have all the time in the world to think about obscure matters that nobody cares about. I care, and that’s enough for me.

Now that I think about it, my interest in such a Method goes back to the moment my mind switched on in my mid-20s. 

I don’t want to get bogged down in autobobographical reflections, but way back in grad school I was introduced to a thinker called W.R. Bion who essentially attempted to accomplish just this by creating a purely abstract metapsychology. Not only was I influenced by some of his ideas, others I stole outright -- for example, O. That was his symbol for Ultimate Reality, and I found no need to reinvent the circle. 

Now, first of all, no finite person could ever possess O. At the same time, no one can avoid attempting to do so, since our ceaseless questioning presupposes an unrestricted desire to know, and this is conformed to a perfect and unconditional truth. 

Let me bring this discussion down a notch from Lonergan to one of his students, Robert Spitzer, who devotes a section to the subject in his The Soul’s Upward Yearning: Clues to Our Transcendent Nature from Experience and Reason. In it he writes of

the presence of something perfect, unconditional, and unrestricted within our consciousness that beckons us ahead of any imperfect and finite idea or ideal [and] that causes us to seek… beyond anything previously learned or discovered. 

It is a “transcendental horizon” 

that can neither be described nor explained through any set of restricted, conditioned, or imperfect categories or realities.

It is precisely the implicit presence of this unrestricted reality that allows us to consider this or that rug and say, No, that’s not the one. Do you have one in 26 dimensions? Spitzer asks

how do we know the partial intelligibility of our answers every time we have arrived at them? We must have a tacit awareness of what complete intelligibility is like. If we did not have this tacit awareness, we would not immediately recognize the partial intelligibility of every answer that is not completely intelligible.

There’s a lot more, but you get the idea, which is that no idea is in total conformity with O, even though every true idea is in partial conformity to it. 

Nor do I want to serve dessert just yet -- i.e., sweet insultainment -- but do notice that our most Important Thinkers systematically repress awareness of this unrestricted horizon and superimpose a grid of ideology over it. This is how O is reduced to Ø.

For Lonergan, 

the “supreme heuristic notion” is “the complete intelligibility of the whole of reality,” because it underlies all other heuristic notions, and therefore, all relational ideas (ibid).

Regarding the latter, "Without relational ideas, we would not be able to know or communicate anything about anything…” There would be no about, and therefore no intersubjective link between subjects or between subject and object. "Total stupidity" -- much like a newsroom, college classroom, or transgender bathroom. 

Lonergan even deploys the above to prove the existence of God. It’s one of my favorites, and I arrived at my own vulgar version of it before knowing anything about Lonergan's, which goes as follows:

If the totality of reality is completely intelligible, then God exists.

But the totality of reality is completely intelligible.

Therefore God exists. 

There’s a lot more to it -- i.e., leading up to that syllogism — but let’s move on. Tomorrow. We'll end with this confirmation:

And this unexpected find: