A Couple of Soph-Centered Cosmonauts

Back now to Understanding and Being. Toward the end of Lecture 7 Lonergan says something that reminds me of what was mentioned in the previous post about light that has been traveling for billions of years hitting a bullseye on the retina. What perfect aim!  

Well, truth is light, and it too occasionally hits its target. This one hit me, and it’s entirely possible that it missed everyone else. Or, like a message in a bottle, it just happened to wash up on my driveway. 

It’s in the context of a discussion of the nature of subjects and objects, and the problem of objectivity. It also goes to the old philosophical question of where we begin, with the objects of knowledge or the intellect that knows them? For it seems we’re always doing both:

The point is to complete the circle. One way to complete the circle is to begin from knowing (Lonergan).

Alternatively, one can begin with a metaphysics of the knower, but 

One will be completing the same circle, except that one will be starting from a different point.  

In short, one can begin in the traditional way, with what is external and prior to us — It’s not our fault, it was this way we got here! Besides, it's the woman's fault.

Or, we can begin with what is quite literally first for us -- the knowing subject -- even though it arrives on the cosmic scene long after the objects it potentially knows. Just don’t radically separate the two and create a vicious dualism. Keep the circle spinning:

As long as one completes the circle, the same thing will be said, but it will be said at different points along the line.

And as we’ve said many times, although we can close this or that epistemological circle, any such circle must be situated in the infinitely larger open circle -- AKA spiral -- of ontology.  

In a way, you could say this is Gödel’s whole point, but really, it goes back to Thomas: the rational intellect is not confined to mere reason, but always transcends it.

Which goes to the distinction between what Hayek calls evolutionary (or critical) rationalism, as opposed to the naive constructivist kind that would enclose us in our own manmode prison. Only the former maintains the complementarity between the proper limits and virtual limitlessness of the human mind. So,

In principle, it makes no difference where one chooses to start. What is important is going around the circle….

You first do the circle in a small way, and then you do it in a bigger way. First you get the general idea of the whole way around one level, then you go the whole way around on a higher level. The more significant the developments are, the higher up you move.

This pretty much reflects the whole One Cosmos vision, which I thought was more or less limited to a single cosmonaut, i.e., me. Turns out there are no fewer than two: 

"Insofar as there is any progress,” says Lonergan,

then these circles keep expanding. They move up a pole, as it were, with smaller circles at the bottom and bigger circles at the top.

This is another important point, in that there is an implicit vertical axis around which the circles orbit. But also, whole systems of thought can become detached from the axis and spin off into a void of darkness and tenure. Alternatively, a tiny circle can close upon itself, as in atheistic materialism.   

I will try to keep posts under 1,000 words. I know you have more interesting things to do, although I can’t imagine what they might be.