In Deference to the Other: Lonergan and Contemporary Continental Thought

6. Lonergan’s Postmodern Subject: Neither Neoscholastic Substance nor Cartesian Ego

Chapter 6 Lonergan’s Postmodern Subject Neither Neoscholastic Substance nor Cartesian Ego FREDERICK LAWRENCE The Subject as Self-referential Identity Postmodernism derives from Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology. In rejecting ontotheology, postmodern philosophers and theologians such as Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas, and Marion oppose Idealism’s and Naive Realism’s image of the subject. When Zorba the Greek said, “My God is like me, only bigger, crazier ,” he was reiterating the basic anthropological principle that the god of the person is like the person. Can we invert this thought and say that the way we imagine God will pretty much correlate with the way we imagine ourselves as a human subject? I think we can. Thus, if we imagine substance as an underlying already-out-therenow stuff, and we imagine God to be the supreme already-out-there-now or “already-in-there-now” being endowed with the greatest possible power, then we will probably entertain an image of the human subject as already-out-there-now + consciousness, where by “consciousness” is meant exclusively the intentional side of consciousness. Thus, consciousness does not have to do with awareness proper, but with awareness precisely as awareness of this or that object. For Descartes, then, consciousness is virtually synonymous with the ego cogitans, mental self-reflection, whose chief operation is the objectifying and reflexive one of cogitato.1 Similarly, the German word for 107 consciousness, Bewußtsein, highlights this object-oriented/objectifying/ objectified image of consciousness (as intentionality).2 Although premodern and modern Naive Realism pictures the subject -as-object in virtually the same way as Idealism, it lays greater stress on the subject’s soul than on its consciousness. It declares that the soul knows reality, and insists that it ought to subordinate itself to the natural order made manifest in the laws of nature. These ideas are not wrong in themselves , but Naive Realism—unable or unwilling to ground its knowledge claims critically—is content with commonsense dogmatism. In contrast to the Naive Realist subject-as-object the Idealist one— whether as Cartesian res cogitans or as Kantian transcendental ego— replaces the soul with the self. Classically, the Idealist self is out of this world; it simply presides over the world in terms of itself and on its own terms: the modern self as master and possessor of the world. IDEALISM, NAIVE REALISM AND THE ALREADY-OUT-THERE-NOW Both Idealism and Naive Realism picture the subject to be yet another object in the inventory of objects, to be apprehended by a later reflection on acts of perceiving and knowing other objects. However, whenever we imagine the subject as already-out-there-now and add consciousness, then consciousness is imaged on the model of a closed container: an already-inhere -now property of an already-out-there-now substance. Then the epistemological question inevitably becomes either, How does the subject escape to reach reality out there? or, How does the subject bring in here the reality that exists concretely out there? If, in both Idealism and Naive Realism, the presiding image is that of the subject originally confined to the in here and of the object out there, the objects that are really out there of course include particular instances of people, places, and things commonly called by names or nouns. This would include all beings or entities, even the gods or god. At least in its Kantian form, Idealism agrees with Naive Realism that the human being’s sole access to reality is through sensation (Empfindung), sense intuition (Anschauung), or sense perception (Wahrnehmung). Deprived of the divine intuitus originarius, which can create or produce what it intuits, human beings more or less have to take a good look at what’s out there. The Naive Realist construction of the scholastic tag nihil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu does not differ appreciably from this view. 108 In Deference to the Other Well, then, where do Idealism and Naive Realism part ways? The Naive Realist believes that knowledge and philosophy begin with the material objects in the world out there, whereas for Idealists knowledge and philosophy begin in here with consciousness.3 In contrast the Idealist thinks that nouns and adjectival attributes are constructions—concepts or categories—which come from intellect (Verstand). Concepts are either determinate or indeterminate, depending on whether the materials sensed, intuited, perceived are adequately subsumed under them or not. In any case, such terms or...