The Quest for God and the Good Life

3. Transcendental Method: The Larger Picture of Self-Transcendence

3 | Transcendental Method The Larger Picture of Self-Transcendence As we learned from the cosmological context of Lonergan’s anthropology , the world is ordered into a dynamic, interdependent hierarchy . Lower levels of recurrent schemes set the conditions for the more or less probable emergence and survival of higher recurrent schemes. Higher levels depend on the lower levels, but they also transcend or go beyond them. And they do so in a way that sublates the lower ones, or lifts them up into a greater, richer context that preserves and fulfills them. Lower levels are more essential to the whole, and higher levels are more excellent. Humanity is a later and higher emergence in the cosmos. It transcends and sublates material, chemical, and biological recurrent schemes into a larger psychological context. We have considered insight and its role in the community’s and the world’s development , but insight is not the entire human contribution to emergent probability. The human person is complex. It is comprised of material , chemical, biological, and psychological levels. Moreover, on the psychological level there is a further multiplicity to the human person. Thus far we have considered some of the lower, more essential psychological levels, starting with the human person’s sensitive, intersubjective needs, desires, and fears, and moving up to a high45 er, intellectual level that seeks to direct and to fulfill the spontaneous drives of the lower level. We have seen that these two levels exist in a creative, dialectical tension that can produce both progress and decline. This is a rich picture, but it is not the full picture. Published fifteen years after Insight, Lonergan’s Method in Theology extends Lonergan’s coverage of cognitive theory, epistemology , and metaphysics into the realms of ethics and religion.1 Ethics deals with human decision-making in a social context, and religion pertains to human relationships with the absolutely transcendent —that is, God.2 To Insight’s account of the human person as sensitive, spontaneously interpersonal, and intellectual, Method adds an expanded consideration of the person as concerned with value, exercising freedom, and falling in love. This fuller picture— on the human person as ethically and religiously self-transcendent —is the topic of this chapter. Four Levels of Conscious Intentionality The core of Lonergan’s anthropology as presented in Method is an analysis of human self-transcendence on four levels of consciousness . In each of these four levels, a person is conscious in the sense of being self-aware or self-present and intentional in the sense of seeking a goal.3 Together Lonergan calls these levels “conscious intentionality.” The four levels are: empirical, intelligent, rational, and responsible.4 Each level is designated by one main operation: experience, understanding, judgment, and decision, respectively. So experience is the operation for the empirical level; this first 1. Lonergan writes that cognitive theory, epistemology, and metaphysics answer these questions , respectively: “What am I doing when I am knowing? Why is that knowing? What do I know when I do it?” Lonergan, Method, 25. 2. Insight ends with very brief, yet fruitful discussions on the possibility of ethics and a general notion of and heuristic for transcendental, religious knowledge; see Lonergan, Insight, chaps. 18–20. 3. See Method, 7–8. We will consider consciousness and its intended goals in brief sections devoted to each level. 4. Lonergan distinguishes between reason/rationality and logic. Reason is a broader term. It can be both logical and nonlogical. “The logical tend to consolidate what has been achieved. The non-logical keep all achievement open to further advance. The conjunction of the two results in an open, ongoing, progressive and cumulative process”; Method, 6. Logic operates on propositions, providing control and coherence. Reason facilitates discovery by an advertence to experience. It judges ideas based on both empirical evidence and logical coherence with known truths. More will be said in the following sections. 46  Progress Self-Transcendence  47 level is sometimes simply called “experience.” Understanding is the operation for the intelligent level, and this second level is often called “understanding.” Judgment is the operation for the rational level, and this third level is sometimes referred to as “judgment.” Decision is the operation for the level of responsibility, also called “decision.” Furthermore, for each of these levels, the overarching operation is comprised of multiple suboperations. Lonergan summarizes : There is the empirical level on which we sense, perceive, imagine, feel, speak, move. There is an...