Understanding Seeking Faith

Lonergan promises to reveal “a transcendental method, that is, a basic pattern of operations employed in every cognitional enterprise.” In other words, what we actually do when we know something or anything or everything. And what we know when we're doing it  

I’m in! However, I’d rather just use his thoughts as a springboard for my own reflections. Self-involved megalomaniacs are like that. But in my defense, I’m old enough to have my own opinions, and lazy enough to not want to slog through this book again.

I should say at the top that I don’t really see anything here that’s not expressed more clearly and succinctly in Polanyi, although he is nowhere acknowledged. Seems their vertical paths never crossed.

Mmmmm, gnostalgia. I just grabbed a volume of Polanyi from the shelf to check the index for any signs of Lonergan, but what grabbed my attention were the many frantic notes to myself about the discoveries therein. 

Mind you, I first read this book (Meaning) when I didn’t know anything about anything, but when my mind had just become activated and was hangry for Truth. The notes tell a story in themselves. At least to a self-involved megalomaniac.

For example, this note to myself could be straight out of Lonergan: The act of understanding is more important than what is understood. Boom, there it is. 

Or this: The technique is the content. So, Lonergan’s idea of the Method of method is a geist that's been in my zeits for a long time. Further examination of the pages reveals preoccupations that have never stopped occupying me.  

Which brings to mind another preoccupation: the idea that the journey of the soul involves the discovery of itself via encounters with the objects that reveal it. 

This sounds a bit tautological, but it’s actually the opposite, for this is the way we exit the closed world of mere instinct-bound animality and enter a higher and deeper, transcendental world that will reveal ourselves to ourselves. Paradoxically, the outside reveals the inside.

Which, of course, isn’t a paradox at all, unless you’ve made it one due to a faulty preconceived metaphysic you’ve brought to the game. In reality, the outside can only reveal the inside because it has an inside of its own. This is known as its “intelligibility,” but there is much more to intelligibility than merely the scientific or quantitative kind. 

Rather, the world is full of qualities, and woe to the man who misses out on them, whether due to ignorance, tenure, autism, poor taste, or just inattention. Let’s bring in our house Aphorist:

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

Which we do mean literally, a subject we have discussed in past in reference to the works of Christopher Alexander, especially the four volume Nature of Order (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Christopher+Alexander+the+Nature+of+Order&i=stripbooks&crid=1A9TOPGKWDQVS&sprefix=christopher+alexander+the+nature+of+order%2Cstripbooks%2C151&ref=nb_sb_noss_1).

Thus,

Things are not mute. They merely select their listeners.

So, what things have selected you? I won't bore you with my list, rather, with the previous 4,000 posts about it. But so long as they are freely chosen, these are the very things that reveal ourselves to ourselves, so be careful what you choose to choose you, because

Each one sees in the world what he deserves to see.

Having said this, not all of the things that select us come preassembled. Rather, some assembly is usually required on our part, and this is where things get tricksy, since this involves an irreducible confluence of subjectivity and objectivity, even though -- paradoxically -- this is the only path to objective truth. There is no other, i.e., no “view from nowhere” that can eliminate the subject, let alone illuminate it.

Which reminds me of an idea for a post I had the other day, the notion of a “political view from nowhere.” On the one hand, there can be no such thing in politics, since politics is inherently factional, combative, and dynamic. 

But on the other hand, there is no becoming in the absence of Being (change my mind), so the superficial combat of politics must rest upon certain enduring principles, or it reduces to power — i.e., to a totalitarian leftism for everyone, good and hard.

I was discussing this yesterday with the boy, who has lately taken a great interest in politics. These are obviously interesting times, and yet, he doesn’t regard this as a curse, rather, an exciting substitute for the day-to-day masculine soap opera of baseball season.

Although he is temperamentally sane (AKA conservative), he also knows that to be ignorant of the other side of the argument is to be ignorant of both.

But how does one choose? I told him that one needs to think things through until one arrives at Rock, i.e., those things that are true and cannot not be true. All thought is for the purpose of arriving at Rock, and until one does so, one will be plunged into obscurity and ambivalence.

Or in other words, one will be locked up in Plato’s cave, looking the wrong way. Those are shadows of rock, not the rock that makes them!

This was followed by a discussion of mineralogy, i.e., the various types of rock which aren’t going anywhere so long as humans remain human and don’t all fall into progressive tyranny. At any rate,

As long as we do not arrive at religious categories, our explanations are not founded upon rock.

This doesn’t necessarily mean a religion, rather, just what it says: religious categories. They say that for most people, religion is “faith seeking understanding.” However, for the pneumatic Raccoon it’s actually the other way around, i.e., understanding seeking faith. 

That is to say, we begin at the other end, with intellectual certitude regarding those timeless truths, but then pray for the faith to “be,” or incarnate them, so to speak (what we call incargnosis). 

For on the one hand, our soul has “selected” them, but come to find out it is we who have been selected by someone who seems to know us intimately, or at least has been reading our mail. But who could believe such a thing? I don’t know, but

What is difficult is not to believe in God, but to believe that we are important to Him.

Therefore,

If we believe in God we should not say, "I believe in God," but rather, "God believes in me."

So, have faith in God’s faith, not ours. His rock beats our scissors.